For , the critical polymer volume fraction is
If is the volume assigned to one amino acid in the lattice model, the critical number densities are exactly
The extra physical approximation needed to use the given radius of gyration is that a chain in a poor solvent is a compact polymer globule. Its size then scales as with , so . This gives the standard scaling estimates
With , numerical substitution gives
Using only the leading large- value gives and , respectively. These are scaling estimates, not geometrically exact densities.
For comparison, a specifically uniform spherical compact protein has the radius of gyration of a uniform sphere, , so its physical volume is . Taking instead gives and . The factor between these conventions is geometric. The PDF does not give a monomer volume, globule density or shape model, and a radius of gyration alone does not determine an exact molecular volume. The model-independent conclusions are the formulas in terms of and the 300:1 ratio of monomer to protein number density.
The particle carries positive surface charge density . Its surrounding electric double layer has an excess of negative chloride counterions and a deficit of positive magnesium coions. Thus decreases to zero, decreases towards its bulk value, and increases towards its bulk value. The diffuse charge density is negative and tends to zero.
If denotes the bulk number of dissolved salt formula units per unit volume, the far-field number densities are and . The bulk is neutral even though these number densities differ. In the dilute mean-field picture the total diffuse electric charge is , ensuring overall electroneutrality. A molecularly bound compact layer would require additional surface-chemistry information and is not assumed in the supplied potential.
Figure 1.
Counterion enrichment and coion depletion around a positive sphere
. Original schematic. The left panel distinguishes the positive surface from an excess of chloride in the surrounding diffuse cloud; symbol positions are illustrative. The right panel plots the mean-field concentrations normalized separately to their bulk values, for a small illustrative positive surface potential. Both normalized curves tend to one, although bulk chloride number density is twice bulk magnesium number density. Details.
Let be the permittivity, , the elementary charge, and the bulk salt formula-unit number density. The Boltzmann distribution gives
Consequently the exterior Poisson-Boltzmann equation is
For small , meaning , linearize the exponentials. The Debye–Hückel approximation gives
This is also : the divalent cation contributes and the two monovalent anions contribute . In terms of molar salt concentration in , replace by ; if is in , use . The molar ionic strength is in the same concentration units.
The boundary conditions are and, by Gauss's law,
Here the surface charge is uniform and the spherically symmetric interior field is zero. Set ; the radial equation reduces to . Decay excludes the growing exponential, so write . Then , giving
It solves the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation, not the full nonlinear equation at finite . The radial ion profiles, consistently to first order, are
The exponential Boltzmann distribution formulas above express the full mean-field relation, but substituting a linearized potential into them is accurate only to the retained order. A useful electroneutrality check is
The result is the Debye-Hückel potential of a charged sphere.
Use thermal de Broglie wavelength and spacing . Degeneracy onset from thermal wavelength occurs at
The numerical factor depends on the convention for a typical momentum, but the scale does not. For fermions the Fermi temperature gives a comparable scale for spin degeneracy two.
Representative estimates, with the assumed densities stated explicitly, are:
SystemAssumed number densityAssumed particle mass
Conduction electrons
Dilute heavy atomic cloud
Neutrons at nuclear-scale density
Here is the atomic mass constant. Thus the characteristic orders are for electrons, sub-microkelvin for a dilute heavy atomic gas, and for neutrons. There is no density-independent quantum-degeneracy temperature for atomic gases: for example, taking and mass instead gives about . These are illustrative input estimates, not values supplied by the paper. Denser neutron-star cores require relativistic and interaction corrections; the estimate identifies the degeneracy scale rather than a precise stellar temperature.
Use a three-dimensional ideal gas at the same number density n for both isotopes. An unpolarized helium-3 gas has spin degeneracy two, hence
Helium-4 has a single spin state, and the ideal Bose-gas saturation condition gives
Eliminating n, using and , yields
The fermionic spin degeneracy must be included. This is an ideal-gas estimate; strong interactions in liquid helium prevent identifying it with an exact experimental transition temperature.
A non-ideal gas departs from because interactions and finite particle size affect its pressure. At sufficiently low number density , the virial expansion separates these corrections:
The second virial coefficient has dimensions of volume per particle, while has dimensions of volume squared. These are density-series coefficients, not the coefficients of a pressure-series expansion with the same names.
For classical particles interacting through a pair potential ,
Repulsion contributes positively and attraction negatively. A hard core of diameter gives , four times the geometric volume of one sphere. The factor reflects the volume excluded to the centre of a second particle together with pair counting; it is not simply the occupied geometric volume.
Expanding the Van der Waals equation at gives
The virial coefficients of the van der Waals gas are therefore and . The Boyle temperature, , makes the leading correction vanish, but does not remove the higher coefficients or turn the gas exactly ideal. More realistic potentials give temperature-dependent higher coefficients that need not equal the van der Waals values.
A useful measurement is a sequence of dilute isothermal pressure–volume observations. Plotting against exposes as the zero-density intercept and as its initial slope. Control temperature and density calibration, check equilibration and adsorption on the container walls, and vary the fitted density interval to test truncation error. One measured virial coefficient cannot uniquely reconstruct the pair potential. Near coexistence or a critical point a short density series may fail, and at quantum-degenerate densities exchange statistics add corrections even without interactions.
Ensemble and applications. A grand canonical ensemble describes a system exchanging both energy and particles with a large reservoir. Its fixed control parameters are , while microstates with different have probabilities
Weak coupling allows the system's energy levels to remain meaningful; equilibrium fixes the reservoir temperature and chemical potential. The grand potential is , with now the mean population. It generates entropy, pressure and mean particle number by differentiation. This ensemble is convenient for gases in contact with particle reservoirs, independently occupied quantum levels and surface adsorption; its particle-number fluctuations are part of the description, not an error in counting.
Classical single-level limit. For the single-level grand partition function in the dilute limit, put . Empty and singly occupied levels contribute and . In the dilute classical limit , higher occupancies contribute only at order or beyond:
This truncation does not impose the Pauli principle on a classical gas. A fermion state has exactly , a boson state has , and Maxwell-Boltzmann occupancy weights give ; they all agree to this order. In particular, , with the classical Maxwell-Boltzmann result exactly .
grand potential and chemical potential. With , summing the single-level logarithms and using the stated density of states gives
Substitute , for which
Combining this with the density-of-states prefactor gives . Thus
Differentiating at fixed ,
Similarly , so . This is the grand-canonical chemical potential of a classical ideal gas. The condition states the classical regime. The supplied density of states counts one internal state; extra internal degeneracies would have to be included consistently rather than inserted at only one stage.
One adsorption site. Take the free-vapour energy reference as zero and the binding energy as . A site is either empty or singly occupied; the latter has vibrational partition function . Its adsorption-site grand partition function and mean occupation are
The chemical potential of an adsorbed species on equivalent sites follows by inverting the occupation ratio
The factor is the vacant-site probability. The binding reference and the energies included in must be chosen consistently, so that vibrational zero-point energy is not counted twice.
Isotherm. The vibrational factor in a Langmuir equilibrium constant is fixed by adsorption equilibrium, . Neglecting vapour internal degrees of freedom and writing its number density as gives . Therefore
This is the Langmuir isotherm: initially linear, increasing monotonically and concave down, approaching unit coverage. Half coverage occurs at . The coefficient has inverse-pressure units. It assumes equivalent independent sites, at most one molecule per site and no lateral interaction or multilayer adsorption. The molecular mass appropriate to the vapour determines .
Figure 1.
Original dimensionless Langmuir coverage curve with half-coverage and limiting behavior
. Details.
A real uptake measurement must separate adsorbed molecules from free gas in the apparatus. Langmuir's original mica experiment compared a mica-containing bulb with a similar blank and inferred uptake from calibrated gas volumes and pressures. His stated blank contribution and bath-temperature drift limited the inferred adsorption; a saturating curve alone does not establish ideal equivalent sites.[ref]
Structure through pair correlations. For a homogeneous isotropic monatomic liquid of number density , the radial distribution function is defined by
It compares the conditional density around a tagged particle with the bulk density. A repulsive core makes close neighbours unlikely; a first peak identifies a preferred coordination shell, and damped peaks at larger radii describe short-range order. Far away, in the bulk limit. Unlike a crystal, an ordinary liquid has no indefinitely repeated positional order. An ideal uncorrelated gas has away from the tagged particle. The shell factor must not be confused with itself.
Figure 1.
Original schematic radial distribution function showing a core exclusion region and damped liquid-like coordination shells; the curve is illustrative rather than measured data
. Details.
The same pair structure enters the static structure factor measured through scattering. In the bulk isotropic convention,
Thus real-space coordination and reciprocal-space scattering peaks describe the same correlations.
Energy from the structure. If interactions are sums of a central pair potential , the equipartition theorem gives the classical kinetic energy . Count the interaction of a tagged particle with its neighbours and divide by two to avoid counting each pair twice. The pair-correlation expression for internal energy is
This makes structure thermodynamically useful: short-distance repulsion and the attractive region contribute with different weights. Additional internal molecular modes or many-body interactions require extra terms. The formula is a classical bulk pair-potential result, not a universal energy formula for every liquid.
Pressure and the dilute expansion. The mechanical virial theorem relates the pair forces to pressure. The virial pressure from pair correlations is
At low density, , giving the virial expansion
The second virial coefficient has units of volume per particle; higher coefficients encode additional cluster correlations. A hard-sphere exclusion diameter gives . Attractions contribute negative terms and can make negative. Although the pair-correlation formulas can describe a dense liquid when its actual is known, truncating the virial series after a few terms is normally a dilute-fluid approximation. It should not be silently extrapolated through condensation or into a dense liquid.
Component chemical potentials. Define the per-spin quantum concentration . For a classical component with one-particle potential energy , the local Helmholtz free energy density is . Its derivative with respect to number density gives the full local chemical potential, including the magnetic energy. With the up state defined as the lower level,
The Bohr magneton is a magnetic moment; is an energy. The factor two for the two spin states is not already included in .
Total equilibrium chemical potential. If spin conversion is allowed, a particle can be added in either spin state at the same equilibrium free-energy cost. Thus
not their sum or zero. The total particle number, or a reservoir, fixes this common value; the supplied information does not specify a numerical chemical potential. A useful local expression is , with , whose density dependence is found below.
Why it is uniform and common. Moving a small number of one species from to changes the free energy by . If this difference were nonzero, a transfer could lower the free energy. Equilibrium under diffusion therefore requires each full chemical potential to be spatially constant. A spin flip transferring from down to up similarly changes free energy by , proving equality when spin relaxation is permitted. This is chemical equilibrium of a classical spin gas. Mere thermal contact at fixed separate spin populations would not enforce the latter equality; full spin equilibrium is the necessary assumption. A spatially varying magnetic field is balanced by a spatially varying density, not by a varying full chemical potential.
Magnetization. Invert the component equations at the common :
The two levels have moments and along the field. The magnetization, magnetic moment per unit volume, is therefore
Its SI units are . This expression neglects interactions and magnetic feedback of the gas on the specified external field.
High-temperature response. For , and , yielding
At fixed number density, this is the Curie law: the susceptibility with respect to is . The conventional dimensionless susceptibility with respect to is approximately when . At fixed , however, changes with temperature, so itself need not scale simply as . The moment per particle has the Curie behaviour; the density constraint must be stated.
Total density. Adding the two populations gives
For a finite container and fixed , normalization gives . In a weak field the leading density is uniform, with changes only of order . Particles preferentially occupy regions where the magnitude of the field lowers one of the spin energies, even though the common chemical potential remains uniform.
Classical translational statistics. Write the number density as and the thermal de Broglie wavelength as . Quantum exchange is negligible when wave packets rarely overlap:
The equivalent state-counting statement is that the mean occupation of each thermally relevant one-particle state is much smaller than one. The equations in this question count one internal species; with equally populated spin states the relevant density per species is .
Let be the dimensionless quantum gas fugacity, with the lowest one-particle energy chosen as zero. Both quantum distributions can be written
If , then for all , recovering Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics. Conversely, low occupation even at the spectrum's bottom requires for bosons or for fermions; either condition implies
A single high-energy state can be sparsely occupied even in a degenerate gas, so the condition must hold across the relevant spectrum, not just for one arbitrarily chosen energy. Also, classical translational statistics does not imply that all internal excitation energies or other quantum effects can be ignored.
Grand partition function, density and pressure. Noninteracting particles have independent occupations of each one-particle state. Put . Summing the allowed occupations gives
Therefore
The grand potential is for this homogeneous gas. Replacing the sum by and using gives
The mean number is , giving
For bosons, the grand sum requires when the ground energy is zero. A macroscopic condensate at the limiting must be separated from the continuum integral in the condensed phase. The following small- calculation is in the normal, nondegenerate regime, so that complication does not enter.
Density expansion and inversion. Expand the occupation as a geometric series:
The Gaussian wavevector integral for its th term is
It follows that
For the inverse series, put and try . Substitution gives , hence
The leading equality directly connects the density and occupancy criteria for classical behavior.
Pressure and its first quantum correction. Expanding the logarithm in the pressure expression gives one extra factor compared with the density series:
Insert the inverse series. To second order in ,
Thus
The first quantum correction at fixed density and temperature is
It is negative for bosons and positive for fermions, and vanishes in the classical density limit.
Virial coefficient. Define the number-density virial expansion by
The coefficient has units in this convention. Comparing terms gives
This is the exchange contribution to the second virial coefficient. It arises without a pair-interaction potential; the underlying gas is noninteracting. A molar-density convention would multiply this by the Avogadro constant. For equally populated internal species, exchange occurs within each species and the coefficient in terms of total density is smaller by a factor .
Why the two signs differ. Bosonic exchange symmetry enhances the probability of nearby identical bosons, whereas fermionic exchange symmetry suppresses nearby identical fermions in the same internal state. In the dilute regime, the normalized equal-time pair detection correlation is
The exchange part follows by squaring the Gaussian one-particle coherence factor . At zero separation this gives for bosons and for one-component fermions. Integrating the exchange pair weight provides a direct coefficient check:
Bunching therefore acts like an effective statistical attraction in the dilute equation of state, lowering the pressure needed at fixed density. Exclusion acts like an effective statistical repulsion, raising it. Neither description asserts an actual interparticle force. Different internal fermion species do not exclude each other from a common spatial location in the same way, explaining the importance of the species convention.
Use the Gibbs-Duhem equation for a homogeneous, extensive, single-component thermodynamic phase:
At fixed temperature, this becomes , with number density . Separately, at fixed particle number,
The chain rule along the same isothermal process in the equation of state now gives
Consequently
This is isothermal compressibility from chemical-potential response. Since chemical potential has units of energy per particle, the right-hand side has units of volume per energy, or , as required. The derivation assumes a smooth bulk equation of state; changing the fractions of coexisting thermodynamic phases at fixed pressure needs separate treatment.
Measure single-particle energy from the lowest state and write , with . In a homogeneous system, the number of wavevector states in a thin spherical shell is proportional to . Changing variables from to gives the density of states per unit spatial volume,
where is the area of the unit sphere in dimensions; an additional internal state degeneracy would multiply this expression by a constant.
The Bose-Einstein distribution has . At saturation, , the maximum excited-state number density is
Only the lower endpoint can cause divergence. There the integrand is proportional to
The improper integral converges precisely when its power exceeds . Thus
When , the divergence is logarithmic; when , it is a power divergence. In either case the excited states can accommodate any fixed finite density at every positive temperature, so there is no bulk Bose-Einstein condensation at nonzero temperature.
For completeness, putting and using the Gamma function and Riemann zeta function gives
At fixed density , the right-hand side reaches at ; below it the excess particles occupy the lowest state, with condensate fraction . This is Bose condensation with power-law dispersion in the homogeneous thermodynamic limit. A finite vessel or a trapping potential changes the low-energy state count and must not be silently substituted for that setting.
For attractive nearest-neighbour interactions, , the transformed model is a ferromagnetic Ising model. In three dimensions and at , its infinite-volume spontaneous magnetization has two branches. As the effective field crosses zero, the equilibrium mean spin changes discontinuously from a negative value to a positive value. Since , varying the physical chemical potential crosses this same first-order phase transition.
The particle-hole-symmetric coexistence line is
The mean Ising spin is a rescaled occupation density. Writing for the physical number density,
The negative-spin phase is a dilute gas and the positive-spin phase is a dense, liquid-like phase. If the spontaneous spin magnitude at coexistence is , their number densities are
Thus the physical order parameter is a density or occupation imbalance, not an actual magnetic moment of these particles. In a closed system with an intermediate mean density, the same transition appears as phase coexistence between the two densities. At the density contrast vanishes continuously; above , sweeping the chemical potential gives no coexistence jump. A true discontinuity requires the thermodynamic limit; a finite sum over finitely many cells remains analytic.
Perrin sedimentation experiment Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A colloidal grain in a liquid is large enough to see with a microscope, yet small enough for thermal motion to compete with its tendency to settle. In the Perrin sedimentation experiment, the equilibrium number density falls with height: a visible miniature atmosphere. Counting grains at different heights measures an energy scale; tracking their Brownian motion measures a transport rate. Connecting both to the same Avogadro constant makes the experiment a quantitative test of kinetic theory. The Wiener measure describes an idealized path law; these measurements instead test a physical model and its material parameters.
Jean Baptiste Perrin's 1909 memoir traces his sedimentation experiments to May 1908. It reports relative counts , , , at heights , , , , and compares radius estimates from Stokes settling velocity, counted grain mass, and rows of touching grains.[ref]
The 1926 lecture describes resin precipitated from alcohol into water, washed and fractionated by centrifugation to obtain nearly monodisperse gamboge or mastic grains. Diameter and density were measured separately. A sealed slide-and-cover-glass chamber prevented evaporation; a vertical microscope resolved roughly layers through a roughly depth. Refocusing and photographing compared layer populations after equilibrium; changing temperature reversibly changed the distribution.[ref]
In Les Atomes (1913), Jean Baptiste Perrin restricts the eyepiece view to fewer than five or six grains and alternates observations between heights. Focus displacement requires a refractive index correction to recover actual layer separation. Horizontal positions were marked with a camera lucida, usually every , and distances calibrated with a micrometer; the polygon joins sampled positions rather than recording the intervening trajectory.[ref][ref]
The dimensionless occupancy scale , with number density and thermal de Broglie wavelength . Increasing it approaches the regime where quantum statistics matters. This use of degeneracy must not be confused with degeneracy of an individual energy eigenspace.
A photochemical steady state has production and loss rates balanced for each short-lived species even though individual photochemical reactions continue.
Planck photon distribution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For photons in thermal equilibrium at temperature , Planck's law gives the photon number density per frequency interval. In terms of the Planck function, it is , hence
Plasma-frequency form of London penetration depth Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-25
For carrier number density , charge and effective mass , the plasma frequency is . Combining the second London equation with the magnetostatic Ampère law and Gauss's law for magnetism gives . Therefore the decaying planar solution has length .
The overlap concentration is the concentration at which distinct dilute polymer coils first substantially interpenetrate. It corresponds to roughly one chain per coil volume. If a chain contains repeat units, has molar mass and occupies a coil volume , then its chain number density is approximately , its repeat-unit number density is , and its mass concentration is . A scaling convention uses ; a commonly chosen geometric convention uses . These give different order-one prefactors because a coil has no sharp surface. For an ideal chain, and a site-volume estimate gives overlap volume fraction . A good solvent chain with the Flory approximation instead gives .
For and , the projected profile has the displayed spherical Abel transform inverse. Indeed its composed transform is , with . Differentiate in , divide by , and use the Gamma function recurrence to obtain the coefficient. The same kernel reconstructs tracer number density or isotropic random pressure from their respective projected profiles.