Collisionless effusion 2026-10-20
During collisionless effusion, selective loss changes the distribution of surviving particle velocities without collision-driven relaxation to a new Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The loss law depends on flight paths and on the wall-reflection rule. Speed-dependent depletion and, for specular walls, directional structure can remain.
Past exam of the physics B course of the University of Cambridge 2016 Paper 2 Section C C12 Solution 2026-10-20
For the two unlabelled follow-up requests, distinguish re-equilibrating effusion from collisionless effusion. The calculations below show that escaping atoms carry mean kinetic energy , whereas a bulk atom has mean kinetic energy . If the aperture is small and interatomic collisions maintain near-equilibrium conditions, faster atoms escape preferentially, and the remaining gas relaxes toward a lower-temperature Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. No heat supplied by the walls is available to replace the lost energy.
For a monatomic gas at fixed container volume, conservation of energy gives a quantitative check on this effusive cooling picture:Since , the temperature falls. Under these idealizations ; the gas is not left with a permanently truncated velocity tail when collisions rapidly restore equilibrium.
If interatomic collisions are absent, the individual surviving atoms do not rethermalize to a new common temperature. Their speed distribution becomes selectively depleted, generally favouring slower survivors, and their angular and spatial distribution can also develop structure determined by which trajectories reach the hole. A single lower temperature does not describe the full nonequilibrium distribution. With a direction-randomizing but energy-preserving wall model, an illustrative survival law is ; specular walls can give more detailed directional selection and even persistent nonescaping trajectories. The question supplies no wall-scattering or container-geometry model from which a unique collisionless loss law could be inferred.