Chapter 13, Problem 13E.3BE

Interpretation Introduction

Interpretation:

The electronic contribution to the heat capacity of ${\text{O}}_{\text{2}}$ atoms at $400\text{K}$ is to be calculated.

Concept introduction:

Statistical thermodynamics is used to describe all possible configurations in a system at given physical quantities such as pressure, temperature and number of particles in the system.  An important quantity in thermodynamics is partition function that is represented as,

  $q={\displaystyle \sum _i{g}_i{e}^{-{\epsilon }_i/kT}}$

Where,

• $g_i$ represents the degeneracy.
• ${\epsilon }_i$ represents the energy of $i^{th}$ microstate.
• $k$ represents the Boltzmann constant with value $1.38\times {10}^{-23}\text{J}/\text{K}$.
• $T$ represents the temperature $\left(\text{K}\right)$.

It is also called as canonical ensemble partition function.