Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-short-options-paper-shared-by-parts-a-and-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2019/s16/1/a/solution

Assume a dilute, nondegenerate, nonrelativistic ideal gas in local thermodynamic equilibrium, with ground-state atomic hydrogen, protons and electrons, and neglect excited atomic levels and interactions. Let the conserved number of hydrogen nuclei per volume be , so and . Equality of chemical potentials for gives the Saha ionization equation
The factor two is electron spin; and must be defined consistently with nuclear spin. The small difference between the atomic and proton translational partition functions has been neglected. Therefore
For the ground-state convention , , the statistical prefactor is one. At fixed volume is constant, whereas an isobaric heating process would not have a constant .

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