Past exam of the thermal and statistical physics course of the University of Cambridge / 2021 / Section B / 4 / c / Solution

At fixed temperature, volume and the numbers of all other species, the chemical potential is ${\mu }_{\alpha }=(\partial F/\partial N_{\alpha }{)}_{T,V,N_{{\alpha }^{\prime }\ne \alpha }}$. For the combined noninteracting mixture, add the free energies from (a) and (b). Since the thermal de Broglie wavelengths are independent of particle number at fixed temperature, differentiation givesEach logarithm has a dimensionless argument, and each chemical potential has units of energy per molecule. The binding offset must be kept consistently when comparing species.