The conventional face-centered cubic lattice cell contains four atoms, so
The preceding free-electron and Debye expressions give
At low temperature the electronic and lattice heat-capacity crossover in a monovalent metal is found from
Thus the electronic term dominates for K within the normal-metal model. Both low-temperature approximations are well controlled at that crossover. At exactly zero temperature both heat capacities vanish; below sufficiently small finite-size energy scales a continuum model also needs revision.
Room temperature is not : using the cubic formula at 300 K would incorrectly predict , far above the harmonic high-temperature limit . Instead use the Dulong-Petit law as an estimate:
Keeping the finite cutoff in the Debye heat capacity gives
At 300 K this is , whereas , giving . Either appropriate room-temperature estimate shows that the lattice contribution dominates. The electronic approximation remains excellent because .
Figure 1.
Electronic and full Debye lattice heat capacities of the stated copper model, with the low-temperature crossover and room temperature marked
. Details.
For the electronic and lattice heat-capacity crossover in a monovalent metal, to obtain a numerical estimate from alone, assume monovalent potassium is a three-dimensional free electron gas with a parabolic band. Including both spins, the molar density of states is . Using the supplied approximate coefficient , rather than silently replacing it by , gives
Equating it to the stated low-temperature Debye heat capacity yields the nonzero crossover
We used and . This is self-consistently far below and the Fermi temperature. Using the exact Sommerfeld coefficient instead gives ; that is a change of approximation, not a discrepancy in the algebra. Without a band/DOS assumption, the supplied Fermi energy does not by itself determine .