For fixed degeneracies and ionization energy,
Therefore increases with temperature in this model. Ionization costs positive energy, so it is suppressed at low temperature by its Boltzmann factor. At higher temperature that penalty becomes less important.
Ionization also creates an additional independently translating particle and more ways to distribute the particles and their momenta. This favours the ionized mixture through its translational and mixing entropy, consistent with the prefactor and increasing ionization at high temperature.
For monatomic species, there are no molecular rotational or vibrational factors. Assume excited electronic states are negligible, so the internal partition sums are the ground-state degeneracies. A free electron has two spin states, giving
with the analogous expression for the ion. Since losing one electron changes the atomic mass negligibly, . Hence
This is the ground-state form of the Saha ionization equation. Its assumptions include a dilute, nondegenerate ideal mixture, negligible interparticle interactions, thermal and chemical equilibrium, no additional ionization stages, and consistent treatment of internal degeneracies. Nuclear-spin factors may be omitted when they cancel between the atom and ion; they must not be counted on only one side.
Chemical equilibrium for requires
Insert the given chemical potential form and define the positive ionization energy
After collecting logarithms,
so
Define a dimensionless concentration equilibrium constant using a standard number density :
Each is a molecular partition function density, with units of inverse volume. Consequently has density units and division by makes dimensionless. All ground-state energies must use the same energy reference.
At fixed temperature,
Thus magnetic-field-dependent Langmuir adsorption is even in and increases with . At fixed nonzero gas pressure, stronger field increases surface coverage; in an isotherm plot, the half-coverage pressure moves to lower pressure. The saturation coverage remains one because the number of sites is unchanged.
For weak fields, with ,
There is no linear small-field change. At large , , and at fixed the coverage approaches one. The field lowers the free energy of the surface spin ensemble relative to the unsplit bulk; simply averaging the two surface energies to would miss this equilibrium effect.
Figure 1.
Original magnetic Langmuir isotherms and field-dependent coverage in dimensionless variables
. Details.
At adsorption equilibrium, . The expressions from part (d) give
Define
Solving the occupation ratio yields
The coefficient has units of inverse pressure, so is dimensionless. The two spin states contribute a factor two on both sides of the adsorption equilibrium and cancel; retaining the surface factor but dropping the bulk degeneracy would incorrectly double .
For the adsorbed lattice gas, the Helmholtz free energy is
Use Stirling's approximation with large, then differentiate at fixed . Writing surface coverage as gives the adsorption chemical potential
The occupation ratio comes from site-mixing entropy; it is essential near saturation.
Let be the number of free atoms and . In the field-free gas, both spin states have zero energy, so the one-atom partition function is , where is the thermal de Broglie wavelength. For a dilute ideal gas,
Therefore
The last equality uses . The bulk spin degeneracy is two even though the bulk magnetic field vanishes: degeneracy is not the absence of spin states.
Use the ideal Langmuir adsorption model: identical independent sites, at most one atom per site, no lateral interactions, and no additional thermally active adsorbed degrees of freedom beyond the two spin states. Treat the atoms as indistinguishable and localized after adsorption; only site occupancy and spin choices distinguish configurations.
There are ways to select occupied sites. For any such selection, independent spin sums contribute . Thus
With as defined in part (b), this is
Equivalently, starting from labelled particles gives distinct assignments to different sites; division by removes particle relabellings. The removes the site multiplicity already included in each full one-particle function.
If denotes the one-site internal factor instead, and . These are identical physical results, not different counting models. In particular, the complete-function convention gives and hence .
Put . Summing the two Boltzmann factors gives the occupied-site internal partition function
If the single atom can occupy any of the identical sites, its complete surface partition function is
One also commonly calls the one-site factor itself . Both conventions are valid, but the combinatorial factor in part (c) must use the same convention. We use the complete one-atom surface function below and give the equivalent one-site expression.
Take the energy of an isolated, field-free gas atom as zero, and let be the field-independent binding energy at one adsorption site. The two adsorbed spin energies are
Here is the Bohr magneton. The lower state is stabilized by increasing ; the assignment of the two signs to names for the spin projections is a convention.
Gallium has three valence electrons, one fewer than silicon, and acts as an acceptor impurity. A neutral acceptor can be described as a negatively charged centre binding an electron hole. Thermal release of these holes gives a p-type semiconductor.
At low temperature, the bound hole can absorb far-IR photons in transitions between acceptor levels. The simplest scalar hydrogenic acceptor state model predicts
so one expects a discrete bound-hole absorption series followed by a photoionization continuum. In that idealization, the first lines would be at , and , with threshold .
The hole effective mass is not supplied, so the electron mass cannot be reused to give numerical Ga line positions. In a real valence band, multiple hole bands, anisotropic masses and spin-orbit effects can split and complicate the series; acceptor spectra are generally less accurately described by one scalar hydrogenic ladder.[ref]

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