Chapter 9 - Answers to selected exercises

1. What is the compressibility of a gas of free fermions at zero temperature? Obtain the numerical value for electrons with the density of conduction electrons in metallic sodium. Compare your results with experimental data for sodium at room temperature.

2. An ideal gas of fermions, with mass

and Fermi energy and

, is at rest at zero , where is the

temperature. Find expressions for the expected values velocity of a fermion. 3. Consider a gas of free electrons, in a

-dimensional space, within a hypercubic

container of side . Sketch graphs of the density of states versus energy for dimensions and . What is the expression of the Fermi energy in terms of the particle density for and ? 4. Show that the chemical potential of an ideal classical gas of monatomic particles, in a container of volume , at temperature , may be written as

where

is the volume per particle, and

is the

thermal wavelength. Sketch a graph of versus . Obtain the first quantum correction to this result. That is, show that the chemical potential of the ideal quantum gas may be written as the expansion

and obtain explicit expressions for the prefactor

for fermions and bosons.

Sketch a graph of versus (that is, versus the temperature in convenient units) for fermions, bosons, and classical particles.

5. Obtain an asymptotic form, in the limit free fermions adsorbed on a surface of area

, for the specific heat of a gas of , at a given temperature . , in the ultrarelativistic

6. Consider a gas of free electrons, in a region of volume regime. The energy spectrum is given by

where is the linear momentum. (a) Calculate the Fermi energy of this system. (b) What is the total energy in the ground state? (c) Obtain an asymptotic form for the specific heat at constant volume in the limit .

7. At low temperatures, the internal energy of a system of free electrons may be written as an expansion,

Obtain the value of the constant , and indicate the order of magnitude of the terms that have been discarded.

8. Consider a system of free fermions in

dimensions, with the energy spectrum

where

and

. (a) Calculate the prefactor

of the relation

. (b) Calculate the Fermi energy as a function of volume and number of particles . (c) Calculate an asymptotic expression, in the limit , for the specific heat at constant volume.

9. Consider again the gas of ultrarelativistic free electrons, within a container of volume , at temperature , in the presence of a magnetic field . If we neglect the effects of orbital magnetism, the energy spectrum is given by

where is the Bohr magneton and of this system may be written as

. (a) Show that the Fermi energy

Obtain expressions for the prefactors and . (b) Show that the magnetization in the ground state can be written in the form

Obtain an expression for the constant the ground state in zero field.

. (c) Calculate the susceptibility of

10. In the classical paramagnetic theory of Langevin, proposed before the advent of quantum statistics, we assume a classical Hamiltonian, given by

where is the magnetic moment of a localized ion. (a) Show that the canonical partition function of this system is given by

where is the elementary solid angle of integration. (b) Show that the magnetization (along the direction of the field) is given by

where

is the Langevin function. (c) Show that the susceptibility in zero field is given by the Curie law,

11. Obtain an expression for the magnetic susceptibility associated with the orbital motion of free electrons in the presence of a uniform magnetic field , under conditions of strong degeneracy, , and very weak fields, simplify the expression of , you may use Euler's sum rule, . To