Adiabatic scaling of a Fermi gas with power-law density of states Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
For density of states , , the grand canonical ensemble has . Strict monotonicity of Fermi gas entropy per particle makes constant at fixed entropy and particle number. Therefore and are constant along a reversible adiabatic process.
Differentiating the grand potential gives
A reversible adiabatic change in an isolated gas keeps and fixed. To infer constant , one must check that this ratio is one-to-one, rather than merely assuming it.
Put , , and for . Integration by parts gives and , and
The strict inequality is the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality for the positive weight , since is not constant on its support. This proves strict monotonicity of Fermi gas entropy per particle and hence is constant. Then gives constant, and gives
This adiabatic scaling of a Fermi gas with power-law density of states concerns positive temperature; the zero-temperature limit is a separate limiting case.