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Assgn 2

1. Consider a system of N particles connected by springs in a ring configuration. Evaluate the partition function and specific heat quantum mechanically and in the limits of N→∞ and a→0. Relate the continuous system to a 1D photon gas. 2. The partition function of a string with transverse oscillations indexed by m and frequency ωm=mω0 is the Dedekind eta function. Find the partition function and behavior for a bosonic string with 24 independent transverse directions. 3. Solve problems 7.1 to 7.5 in Huang's "Statistical Mechanics" textbook. Solve problems 4, 8, and 11 in Kardar's textbook chapter 4. 4.

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122 views2 pages

Assgn 2

1. Consider a system of N particles connected by springs in a ring configuration. Evaluate the partition function and specific heat quantum mechanically and in the limits of N→∞ and a→0. Relate the continuous system to a 1D photon gas. 2. The partition function of a string with transverse oscillations indexed by m and frequency ωm=mω0 is the Dedekind eta function. Find the partition function and behavior for a bosonic string with 24 independent transverse directions. 3. Solve problems 7.1 to 7.5 in Huang's "Statistical Mechanics" textbook. Solve problems 4, 8, and 11 in Kardar's textbook chapter 4. 4.

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Pranav Mundada
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Assignment 2 1. Consider N particles of same mass m connected by identical springs with spring constant in one dimension.

. Let the equilibrium distance between the springs be a. The N th particle is connected to the 1-st particle. Thus the particles are on a ring. Let the system be in contact with the heat bath of temperature T (a) Evaluate the partition function and then evaluate the specic heat by treating the system quantum-mechanically. (b) Now take N and call N a = L. Reformulate and revaluate your expressions in terms of an integral over the momentum k . What is the domain of integration of k . This is what is termed to be the Brillouin zone. Perform the integrals in the Debye approximation. (c) Now again starting from the original system, take the limit a 0 but a2 held nite and N a = L held nite. The system now again has innite degrees of freedom, but now has continuous translational invariance instead of the discrete translational invariance of the previous situation. Again, evaluate the partition function and the specic heat. Now take L also to innity and approximate summations by integrations, how is this system related to a gas of photons in 1 dimension kept in a box of size L. 2. The transverse oscillations of a string can be thought of a collection of innite decoupled oscillators. Each oscillator indexed by m has frequency m = m0 , m = 1, 2, where 0 is the fundamental frequency. Evaluate the partition function at temperature T , you will need to keep track of the zero point energy for this use the identity 1 m= 12 m=1 which can be shown using analytic continuation. The answer you will obtain is called the Dedekind eta function, which we call ( ), =h 0 /kB T.

Many properties of this function was original conjectured by Ramanujan and proved much later. In bosonic string theory, the string is allowed to vibrate in 24 transverse independent directions. Assuming 1

the oscillators in each of the 24 directions to be independent what is the partition function of the system. Use the following (modular ) property of the Dedekind eta function to obtain the low and high temperature behaviour of the partition function. 1 ( ) = ( )

The high temperature behaviour of this partition function is a special case of what is called the Cardy formula. 3. Problems 7.1 to 7.5 of Huang: Statistical Mechanics. 4. Problems of chapter 4 of Kardar: 4, 8, 11. 5. Evaluate density uctuations in the grand canonical ensemble and show that 1 N2 N 2 = N kB T T V is the mean number of where N is the number of particles and N particles and 1 kT = V P/V

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