Translational and two-level energy variance
ID: translational-and-two-level-energy-variance
For a dilute classical ideal gas whose atoms carry independent nondegenerate internal levels , the canonical partition function factorizes into translation and . The upper-level probability is . Taking two derivatives of its logarithm gives the title sum of independent variances. The internal contribution freezes exponentially at low temperature and tends to at high temperature. The translational classical result cannot be continued through quantum degeneracy without changing the model.
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