As the previous section explained, the energy distribution of a macroscopic system of particles can be found by merely counting system energy eigenfunctions.
The details of doing so are messy but the results are simple. For a
system of identical bosons, it gives the so-called:
Finally,
The Bose-Einstein distribution is derived in chapter 11. In fact, for various reasons that chapter gives three different derivations of the distribution. Fortunately they all give the same answer. Keep in mind that whatever this book tells you thrice is absolutely true.
The Bose-Einstein distribution may be used to better understand
Bose-Einstein condensation using a bit of simple algebra. First note
that the chemical potential for bosons must always be less than the
lowest single-particle energy
The fact that
The above argument also illustrates that there are two main ways to produce Bose-Einstein condensation: you can keep the box and number of particles constant and lower the temperature, or you can keep the temperature and box constant and push more particles in the box. Or a suitable combination of these two, of course.
If you keep the box and number of particles constant and lower the
temperature, the mathematics is more subtle. By itself, lowering the
temperature lowers the number of particles
You may recall that Bose-Einstein condensation is only Bose-Einstein condensation if it does not disappear with increasing system size. That too can be verified from the Bose-Einstein distribution under fairly general conditions that include noninteracting particles in a box. However, the details are messy and will be left to chapter 11.14.1.
Key Points
- The Bose-Einstein distribution gives the number of bosons per single-particle state for a macroscopic system at a nonzero temperature.
- It also involves the Boltzmann constant and the chemical potential.
- It can be used to explain Bose-Einstein condensation.