Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2007 / iii / Paper 62 / 2 / a

The degeneracy factor $g_A$ counts internal states with the same energy, including the allowed spin states. The chemical potential ${\mu }_A$ measures the free-energy cost of changing the number of particles of species $A$; in this convention the rest energy remains in the exponential of the nonrelativistic Maxwell--Boltzmann number density.

The chemical potential is fixed by the densities of conserved charges and by chemical equilibrium between reactions. For a reaction ${\sum }_A{\nu }_{A}A=0$, chemical equilibrium requires ${\sum }_A{\nu }_A{\mu }_A=0$. Equivalently, when these are the only constraints, ${\mu }_A$ is a linear combination of the chemical potentials of the conserved charges carried by $A$. An unconstrained species has zero chemical potential. In particular, the photon chemical potential vanishes in thermal equilibrium when photon-number-changing reactions are effective.