Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 66 1 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
Choose real eigenfunctions with . For positive modes, self-adjointness and integration by parts diagonalize the energy:At temperature , the canonical ensemble is a product of centered Gaussian distributions. The equipartition theorem, with Boltzmann constant , givesThe resulting thermal covariance of an elastic filament isFor an unnormalized eigenfunction of squared L2 norm , divide its summand by . This normalization factor cannot be absorbed silently into the modal variance.
For clamped boundary conditions at both ends, the inverse of has Green function, for ,It is cubic on each side of , satisfies the four clamped conditions, has continuous first two derivatives, and has unit jump in its third derivative. Thus , and its eigenfunction expansion is the sum above. In particular,These finite variances require removal of every zero-energy filament mode. An unconstrained free-free elastic filament can translate and tilt at no energy cost; a torqued-torqued elastic filament can translate. Their unrestricted Boltzmann distributions are not normalizable, so the full displacement variance is undefined. Fix those rigid degrees of freedom before applying the positive-mode formula.