Compressibility Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-31
Compressibility measures how readily a sample's volume decreases when its pressure increases. For a simple compressible system with fixed particle number and composition, specify the constraint :
Here denotes pressure, also written elsewhere. The minus sign makes compressibility positive on a mechanically stable equilibrium branch. Its units are inverse pressure, ; its reciprocal is the constrained bulk modulus, measured in pascal units. Holding temperature fixed gives isothermal compressibility; holding entropy fixed gives isentropic compressibility along an isentropic process. The latter describes a reversible adiabatic compression, since an irreversible adiabatic process can increase entropy. [ref]
For an ideal gas, the ideal gas law and the reversible ideal-gas adiabat give, at the same equilibrium state,
Here and are the whole sample's heat capacity at constant pressure and heat capacity at constant volume, and is the heat capacity ratio. Constant is required for the finite-path formula . Reversible adiabatic compression raises the temperature, making the pressure rise more steeply than in an isothermal compression. Thus keeping entropy fixed makes the gas harder to compress locally. For a classical monatomic gas at , , so and ; the corresponding values of the bulk modulus are and .
For a smooth, stable single thermodynamic phase at positive temperature, Maxwell relations also imply
where is the coefficient of thermal expansion. The ideal gas result is one example of this broader link between mechanical and thermal responses. The equality is possible when and the other responses remain finite. These formulas compare equilibrium partial derivatives, rather than arbitrary fast or dissipative compression histories. [ref]
Density susceptibility 2026-10-20
The static density susceptibility is the linear density response to a chemical-potential perturbation. In the quadratic uniform contact Bose gas, . Its inverse is a density stiffness. At zero wavevector at mean field, while the isothermal compressibility includes the additional factor .
Dynamic pressure 2026-10-14
Dynamic pressure is the bulk kinetic energy per unit volume associated with fluid motion at speed in a specified reference frame:
Here is mass density. The word "pressure" identifies its units and its use as a pressure scale; is not an extra isotropic stress to add to the local static pressure in every surface traction. A stationary fluid can have large static pressure with . Conversely, knowing and fixes without fixing static pressure. The definition remains useful in viscous fluid flow and compressible flow, even when the simplest Bernoulli equation is inapplicable. [ref]
For stipulated mass density and reference speed , . At with the same mass density, . This quadratic scaling makes dynamic pressure a useful normalization for the lift coefficient, drag coefficient and pressure coefficient; it predicts four times a particular force only if its corresponding coefficient remains unchanged.
Figure 1. . Original schematic with separate pressure passages and a differential readout. The right panel uses stipulated values, not measurements: ideal stopping in incompressible flow at unchanged height raises static pressure by 240 Pa as the kinetic energy per unit volume falls by 240 Pa. The diagram is not a probe design or a claim that real static pressure ports are error free. Details.
The connection with stagnation pressure requires hypotheses. For steady flow, constant mass density, inviscid flow, and gravity as the only body force, the Bernoulli equation gives, along one streamline,
Here is static pressure, is gravitational acceleration, and is height. Bring that flow to rest without losses at the same height and the limiting static pressure is the stagnation pressure :
There must be no intervening pump supplying work or other energy input. Constancy along one streamline does not assert equal on all streamlines; irrotational flow in a connected region supplies that additional conclusion. Changing height requires retaining . In compressible flow the stopping pressure difference generally differs from , and viscous dissipation can reduce recovered stagnation pressure. [ref]
A Pitot-static tube turns this relation into a measurement: its upstream-facing opening senses stagnation pressure, while separate side openings sample static pressure. Connect these to the positive and negative ports of a differential pressure transducer or manometer. Under the hypotheses above, the measured difference gives
Thus the stipulated and imply , not an independently measured speed. Align the probe with the incoming flow and keep its passages clear: blockage and pinched tubing invalidate the comparison. At very low speed, the difference can be smaller than instrument error; at high Mach number, compressibility and possibly a shock wave require a different reduction. [ref]
A useful control is differential-pressure calibration. For a digital manometer, zeroing establishes the reading at equal port pressures; it does not establish the gain away from zero. The manufacturer's Series 475 Handheld Digital Manometer: Specifications - Installation and Operating Instructions by Dwyer Instruments, Inc. directs the user to vent both ports to the atmosphere before zeroing. Its stated accuracy is a fraction of full scale, not of the reading, and depends on instrument temperature. Select a suitable range and record the instrument variant and units; the manual covers several ranges.[ref]
An independent physical check can use a liquid-column manometer: apply a stable pressure difference to both instruments and compare the digital reading with the hydrostatic pressure inferred from the vertical level difference. For equal-height connections carrying a gas of mass density above a manometric liquid of mass density ,
This follows by balancing hydrostatic pressure down and up the two connected columns. Use vertical height, even if a tube is inclined. Known mass densities, measured height and gravitational acceleration set the comparison scale. Check several differences across the working range and reverse the port connections to check the sign. This is a proposed independent check, not a claim that the cited teaching experiment performed a full instrument calibration. Recheck zero after reconnecting the sealed tubing; a zero adjustment alone cannot detect a blocked passage or an incorrect scale.
Elastic fluid 2026-10-31
A historical physical name for a gas or vapour, emphasizing its mobility and appreciable compressibility. It does not imply an exactly ideal gas or prevent a vapour from undergoing condensation.
Isentropic compressibility is the compressibility at fixed entropy, particle number and composition. The conventional name adiabatic compressibility refers to a reversible adiabatic process; an irreversible adiabatic compression need not keep entropy fixed. For an ideal gas, it is , where is the heat capacity ratio. It describes a steeper local pressure response than isothermal compressibility when .
Isothermal compressibility Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
Isothermal compressibility is the compressibility measured at fixed temperature, particle number and composition. A slowly compressed sealed piston in contact with a thermal reservoir can approach this constraint. For an ideal gas, differentiating at fixed temperature gives , hence . A small pressure increase therefore gives . For a finite change, use the whole isothermal process curve instead.
Take one mole of classical monatomic gas, with stipulated molar gas constant , initially at and . The initial volume is . Compressing to gives
The isothermal compression releases heat to the thermal reservoir; the reversible adiabatic compression retains the input work as internal energy. Reversing either curve gives the corresponding expansion, with adiabatic expansion cooling the gas.
Figure 1.
An ideal gas resists reversible adiabatic compression more strongly than isothermal compression
. Left: two pressure-volume curves through the same initial state; arrows point toward compression. Right: the corresponding temperature changes, including cooling during reversible adiabatic expansion. The dotted line marks half the initial volume. One mole of classical monatomic gas, with and the stipulated above. Details.
The equilibrium curvature of Gibbs free energy provides another measurement of isothermal compressibility:
This follows from , with denoting Gibbs free energy. Within a stable single thermodynamic phase, increasing pressure reduces volume and makes this curvature negative. At phase coexistence, changing the phase fraction can change the volume at constant temperature and pressure; the usual finite single-phase isothermal compressibility then need not exist. Near a critical point, it can diverge. [ref]
Landau quasiparticles describe the long-lived low-energy excitations of an interacting normal Fermi liquid. Starting from a free Fermi gas, imagine switching on interactions without changing the phase or destroying the one-to-one labelling of low-energy states. The resulting excitation carries the quantum numbers of a dressed particle but has a renormalized energy and interactions with other excitations. Its microscopic wavefunction need not resemble a bare electron state. The occupied momenta define a Fermi surface, and the quasiparticle energy measured from the chemical potential vanishes on that surface.
The Landau quasiparticle energy functional expresses the change near equilibrium in terms of occupation changes:
Differentiation gives the energy of one quasiparticle in the distorted distribution. This is a phenomenological expansion around the true interacting ground state, not the assertion that its total energy equals that of independent particles. For an isotropic system, spin-symmetric and spin-antisymmetric components of are expanded in Legendre polynomials. Multiplication by the appropriate Fermi-surface density of states defines dimensionless Landau parameters . The original formulation relates a change in the distribution to the energy shift.[ref]
Pauli blocking makes the low-energy excitations sharp. The phase space for a quasiparticle to scatter while creating another particle–hole pair shrinks as the Fermi surface is approached, giving the regular three-dimensional low-energy Fermi-liquid quasiparticle lifetime
Thus at zero temperature its width is small compared with its excitation energy. The single-particle spectral function has a pole with quasiparticle residue , generally less than one, and an incoherent remainder. In a conventional Fermi liquid the occupation distribution has a discontinuity of height at the Fermi surface, rather than a unit free-particle step.
For an isotropic three-dimensional system, define to include both spins. The quasiparticle density of states determines the low-temperature electronic heat capacity, . In the usual Landau-parameter normalization, the spin response is modified by and the compressibility by . In a Galilean-invariant continuum, ; that particular relation must not be imposed unchanged on a crystal band. A denominator approaching zero signals a possible instability of the assumed normal state.
The same interaction functional and a kinetic equation describe collective zero sound when the excitation frequency exceeds the collision rate. Ordinary first sound is the collision-dominated hydrodynamic limit. The theory organizes thermodynamics, response and transport through a small set of measured effective parameters while explaining why interactions coexist with long-lived fermionic excitations. It is not applicable without qualification in phases where the Fermi-liquid quasiparticle pole disappears or a gap opens over the relevant Fermi surface.
Use the same molar amount for both thermodynamic phases. A hexagonal cell built from two basal lattice vectors at120degrees has volume , not the volume of a three-times-larger full hexagonal prism. With four atoms per stated graphite cell,
Diamond has eight atoms per conventional cubic cell, so
For graphite transforming to diamond,
Therefore
The positive slope reflects diamond's smaller entropy and volume. Higher temperature favors the higher-entropy graphite thermodynamic phase, requiring greater pressure to compensate in favor of the smaller-volume diamond thermodynamic phase.
This estimate treats the supplied ambient molar entropies and volumes as applicable near coexistence and neglects their changes through thermal expansion, compressibility and heat capacity. It gives an approximate gradient, not the transition pressure or a complete high-pressure thermodynamic phase boundary; an intercept would require an additional free-energy datum.
Let be the normalized stationary profile. Multiplying its stationary Gross–Pitaevskii equation by , integrating and integrating the kinetic term by parts yields
This is not simply : the quartic contribution is twice its contribution to that energy per particle. For an infinite periodic system one uses one cell and the corresponding cell particle number, or equivalently average densities.
At fixed lattice spacing, mean density , coupling and temperature, the commonly used condensate compressibility in an optical lattice is
If compressibility means the thermodynamic volume response instead, the Gibbs-Duhem equation at zero temperature gives . Stating the convention removes this factor-of-density ambiguity; the lattice-depth derivative has the same sign at fixed .
For the stable repulsive ground-band Bose-Einstein condensate, the intended trend is for increasing nonzero lattice depth, with mean density held fixed. Deeper wells localize the field, enhancing the repulsive interaction response. To quantify this, in the weak-interaction band approximation write , with the cell average of equal to one. Perturbation in gives
In deep wells the localized orbital is approximately a normalized Gaussian of width . Neglecting interwell overlap, , hence . This explicitly establishes the sign in that controlled regime; the repulsive ground-band calculation describes the broader trend.
The sign statement needs the repulsive, stable ground-band interpretation, not merely the literal assumption . It also need not be a strictly nonzero derivative at : at weak interaction , with normalization corrected at second order, gives and a zero initial slope. A leading density-dominated Thomas–Fermi approximation for a condensate with density positive everywhere gives and no depth dependence of this response at that approximation's order. These limits do not justify a strict universal sign for every unspecified interaction and parameter regime.
For a nonzero uniform wavefunction, the Laplacian vanishes. Dividing the stationary cubic-quintic Gross–Pitaevskii equation by yields
Equivalently, the interaction energy density is and its derivative is the chemical potential. Positive local compressibility requires . This stability condition is distinct from the sign of itself.
First-motion source mechanisms. Locate an earthquake from arrival times and use a seismic velocity model to calculate each station's source takeoff direction. Measure the initial direct P wave polarity after checking instrument sign, component orientation, timing and phase identification. An upward trace at an instrument is not automatically a source compression without the propagation and component convention. Plot the inferred source radiation signs on a focal sphere, commonly using a lower-hemisphere equal-area projection, and seek nodal planes separating positive and negative observations.
For a shear dislocation with orthogonal unit slip and fault-normal vectors , the double-couple fault source has . Its far-field P radiation sign is that of
The two zeros are orthogonal nodal planes; the four quadrants alternate between outward and inward initial radiation. Their orientations and quadrant signs determine candidate strike, dip and rake. Normal, reverse and strike-slip mechanisms give different projected patterns. The earthquake pressure and tension axes are the negative and positive moment-tensor principal directions, respectively; they do not by themselves measure the complete regional stress tensor.
Figure 1.
Original lower-hemisphere equal-area P-radiation polarity examples for ideal strike-slip, normal and reverse double couples
. Details.
There is a fundamental fault-plane ambiguity: exchanging and leaves the radiation tensor unchanged. First motions therefore give a fault plane and an auxiliary plane without saying which actually slipped. Use mapped rupture, aftershock geometry or independent geodetic displacement to select the physical fault where possible. Polarity signs alone do not measure scalar seismic moment, source duration or rupture extent. A poorly sampled focal sphere or many near-nodal observations can admit several mechanisms rather than one defensible beachball.
Propagate uncertainty in event depth, velocity gradients and takeoff angles, allow for mispicked or reversed polarities, and report the range of mechanisms consistent with the observations. A primary method did this by testing alternative locations and velocity models and validated its uncertainty estimates using noisy synthetic data and clusters of events with similar waveforms.[ref] Broadband waveforms and amplitude ratios add information, especially for non-double-couple sources, but they are additional measurements rather than a way to extract amplitude information from a sign-only data set.
Radial density structure. In an isotropic adiabatic material, the seismic parameter is
For a chemically homogeneous region whose background stratification is adiabatic, . Combine this with spherical hydrostatic balance and mass conservation to obtain the Adams-Williamson equations
The inward density increase follows compressibility under the increasing pressure. A specified starting density and measured allow integration within a homogeneous adiabatic layer. Seismic velocities alone, however, do not determine that density normalization, since they contain ratios of moduli to density. Chemical boundaries, phase transitions, nonadiabatic thermal gradients and anisotropy require additional modeling; a composition jump is not obtained by blindly integrating the smooth relation across it.
Use travel times and surface waves to constrain elastic velocities, reflected/converted phases to locate interfaces, and normal-mode frequencies to constrain density as well as elastic structure through their sensitivity kernels. Impose independently known total mass and moment of inertia:
Because these weight depth differently, they help distinguish admissible profiles, but two integrals alone do not specify an arbitrary radial function. Laboratory equations of state and mineral physics restrict composition, compressibility and density jumps. pressure and enclosed mass are matched across interfaces, while density may jump. In a liquid region and , so the shear-wave absence constrains phase state without itself providing a direct density measurement.
The Preliminary Reference Earth Model is a concrete joint inversion of seismic travel times, normal modes, mass and inertia, including density and attenuation along with elastic structure. The original analysis combined these complementary data rather than deriving density uniquely from P wave speed.[ref] A defensible radial density model combines hydrostatic/thermodynamic relations with seismic and global integral constraints, and states where homogeneity and adiabaticity fail.
A normal Fermi liquid describes an interacting fermion system whose low-energy excitations remain continuously connected to adding particles to or removing particles from a Fermi gas. The elementary long-lived excitation is a Landau quasiparticle: adding a particle also changes the surrounding many-body state. Its energy, velocity and interactions are renormalized, even though its electric charge and spin remain those appropriate to the excitation.
Near an isotropic Fermi surface,
Residual interactions make the quasiparticle energy depend on the occupations of other quasiparticles, expressed by the Landau quasiparticle energy functional. Its angular components give the Landau parameters controlling density and spin responses. Thus the successful particle picture does not mean that interactions have become zero.
Pauli blocking restricts the final states available for low-energy collisions. In an ordinary three-dimensional Fermi liquid with regular interactions, a representative decay law is
At , the width vanishes faster than , so an excitation becomes increasingly sharp as it approaches the Fermi surface. Its coherent spectral weight is the quasiparticle residue , and the physical electron occupation has a discontinuity of height at zero temperature. Incoherent spectral weight accounts for the remainder. The quasiparticle occupations themselves obey a Fermi-Dirac distribution.
Several leading thermodynamic signatures retain their gas-like form but have interaction-dependent coefficients. In particular,
for an isotropic spin-one-half model, with the spin-summed quasiparticle density of states per volume. effective mass changes , while the dimensionless interaction parameters separately change the spin susceptibility and compressibility. Collisionless collective density motion can propagate as zero sound, distinct from the single-particle excitations.
The quasiparticle scattering rate often underlies a low-temperature contribution to metallic electrical resistivity, but a mechanism relaxing electrical electric current is needed. In a clean Galilean-invariant continuum, electron-electron collisions conserve total momentum and do not alone give a finite dc electrical resistivity. Crystal Umklapp scattering or other current-relaxing processes change that conclusion.
Normal liquid helium-3 and many metals motivate the Fermi-liquid framework. Pairing, magnetic ordering or other transitions can reconstruct the low-energy states. Generic interacting one-dimensional fermion systems instead form a different low-energy state, so the three-dimensional quasiparticle conclusions should not simply be transferred to a chain.
Dielectric screening is the rearrangement of a medium's charges in response to an applied charge. In a metal, mobile electrons accumulate near a positive perturbation and reduce its long-range potential. Thomas-Fermi screening treats the electron gas locally as an equilibrium gas whose density responds to the local electrostatic potential, ignoring gradients of the density on the microscopic wavelength scale.
Take , background permittivity , and electrostatic potential . An electron's potential energy is , so the local kinetic Fermi energy becomes . For a three-dimensional spin-degenerate parabolic band at zero temperature,
where is the spin-summed density of states per volume per energy. The induced charge is . Combining it with Poisson equation gives
For a point external charge , spherical symmetry and decay at infinity select
Thus the bare potential is cut off exponentially. Fourier transformation makes the same result transparent: , so the static longitudinal dielectric factor is relative to the background. For a free electron band, and .
Figure 1.
Local Thomas-Fermi screening and optical/acoustic modes of an illustrative diatomic chain
. Details.
The local linear approximation requires a weak perturbation and slowly varying fields on the relevant microscopic scale. It omits nonlocal Friedel oscillations and atom-scale structure; a nonlinear local-density treatment is needed near a sufficiently strong charge. Finite temperature replaces by the appropriate compressibility derivative . The nondegenerate limit gives classical screening rather than the degenerate Thomas-Fermi length. A larger density of states means that a smaller potential can move more carriers, hence stronger screening.
A normal Fermi liquid has interacting fermions whose low-energy excitations can be followed continuously from those of a Fermi gas, provided no phase transition destroys that correspondence. A Landau quasiparticle is a particle together with the surrounding many-body response. It has the appropriate charge and spin, a renormalized dispersion and a long lifetime close to the Fermi surface. Interactions remain in both the quasiparticle parameters and the interactions between quasiparticles; they have not been discarded.
Near an isotropic Fermi surface,
The last relation defines the local isotropic Fermi-liquid effective mass. The Landau quasiparticle energy functional expresses how changing occupations shifts other quasiparticle energies:
with normalization of the sum absorbed into . Its angular components give Landau parameters describing collective density and spin response.
The Pauli exclusion principle severely restricts the available final states for low-energy collisions. In an ordinary three-dimensional Fermi liquid with regular interactions,
At zero temperature the decay width decreases faster than , making quasiparticles increasingly sharp near the Fermi surface. Their coherent spectral weight is the quasiparticle residue , and the true electron momentum distribution has a discontinuity of height at zero temperature. The rest of the spectral weight is incoherent. The quasiparticle occupation itself still follows a Fermi-Dirac distribution.
The low-temperature electronic heat capacity is linear, , where is the spin-summed quasiparticle density of states. In an isotropic spin-one-half model, the uniform spin susceptibility and compressibility take the forms
Thus enhanced effective mass and residual interactions can separately change observable responses. The familiar electrical resistivity requires a mechanism relaxing electrical current, such as allowed Umklapp processes; collisions in a perfectly clean Galilean-invariant continuum conserve total momentum and do not alone produce a finite dc resistivity.
Zero sound is a collisionless collective density oscillation sustained by the quasiparticle interaction; ordinary first sound occurs when collisions establish local equilibrium during a cycle. Metals and normal liquid helium-3 supply important examples. The description fails in phases with no sufficiently sharp low-energy quasiparticles, such as generic interacting one-dimensional systems, and must be modified after pairing or another ordering transition.
At wavelengths with , neglect the density-gradient term in the quadratic density-phase action. Complete the square in its remaining density terms:
The convergent Gaussian integral can be performed by a contour shift or by its Fourier-transform identity. Its determinant is independent of at this order. Combining that normalization with the saddle action into a constant gives
The saddle contribution to is ; the additional measure-dependent constant need not be assigned an invented numerical value. The density Gaussian extends the fluctuation integration beyond its exact positivity domain, which is justified only while fluctuations around are small. The smooth zero-winding assumption is also required as discussed above. A constant global phase zero mode gives a finite compact-group volume, handled separately from nonzero phonon modes.
Fourier transforming the Bose-gas phase-only action gives a kernel . Analytically continuing gives its real-frequency poles,
In the present units the excitation energy equals . Each real Fourier coordinate is a harmonic oscillator with inertia coefficient and spring coefficient , hence frequency equal to the square root of their ratio. This is the direct relation to a quantum harmonic chain. The mode is a gapless sound phonon; its finite speed reflects both the compressibility and the phase stiffness .
Retaining the density-gradient term provides a useful check. Its integration instead gives a temporal coefficient , so
This is the Bogoliubov spectrum. Its small- limit is the derived sound branch; at large within the contact model it crosses towards particle-like behaviour. The crossover in the squared dispersion is , precisely the scale beyond which the discarded density gradient is not small.
The same action checks the dimensional restriction in the saddle analysis. At nonzero temperature its zero Matsubara mode gives phase fluctuations proportional to ; at zero temperature integrating the frequency gives . Their infrared divergences invalidate uniform true long-range order for at nonzero temperature and for at zero temperature. The long-wave collective description can remain useful for correlations even where a global condensate saddle is not a literal symmetry-broken state. The contact coupling here is an effective low-energy parameter; this calculation does not determine ultraviolet renormalization or trap-specific surface modes.
Figure 1.
Original dimensionless Bogoliubov dispersion and its sound and particle limits
. Details.