Saturday, February 11, 2012

Thermodynamics

The thermodynamic backdrop of a solid are anon accompanying to its phonon structure. The complete set of all accessible phonons that are declared by the aloft phonon burning relations amalgamate in what is accepted as the phonon body of states which determines the calefaction accommodation of a crystal.

At complete aught temperature, a clear filigree lies in its arena state, and contains no phonons. A filigree at a non-zero temperature has an activity that is not constant, but fluctuates about about some beggarly value. These activity fluctuations are acquired by accidental filigree vibrations, which can be beheld as a gas of phonons. (The accidental motion of the atoms in the filigree is what we usually anticipate of as heat.) Because these phonons are generated by the temperature of the lattice, they are sometimes referred to as thermal phonons.

Unlike the atoms which accomplish up an accustomed gas, thermal phonons can be created and destroyed by accidental activity fluctuations. In the accent of statistical mechanics this agency that the actinic abeyant for abacus a phonon is zero. This behavior is an addendum of the harmonic potential, mentioned earlier, into the anharmonic regime. The behavior of thermal phonons is agnate to the photon gas produced by an electromagnetic cavity, wherein photons may be emitted or captivated by the atrium walls. This affinity is not coincidental, for it turns out that the electromagnetic acreage behaves like a set of harmonic oscillators; see Black-body radiation. Both gases obey the Bose-Einstein statistics: in thermal calm and aural the harmonic regime, the anticipation of award phonons (or photons) in a accustomed accompaniment with a accustomed angular abundance is:

n(\omega_{k,s}) = \frac{1}{\exp(\hbar\omega_{k,s}/k_BT) - 1}

where \,\omega_{k,s} is the abundance of the phonons (or photons) in the state, \, k_B is Boltzmann's constant, and \, T is the temperature.

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