Paper 2, Section II, 35A
(i) The first law of thermodynamics is , where is the chemical potential. Briefly describe its meaning.
(ii) What is equipartition of energy? Under which conditions is it valid? Write down the heat capacity at constant volume for a monatomic ideal gas.
(iii) Starting from the first law of thermodynamics, and using the fact that for an ideal gas , show that the entropy of an ideal gas containing particles can be written as
where and are temperature and volume of the gas, is the Boltzmann constant, and we define the heat capacity per particle as .
(iv) The Gibbs free energy is defined as . Verify that it is a function of temperature , pressure and particle number . Explain why depends on the particle number through .
(v) Calculate the chemical potential for an ideal gas with heat capacity per particle . Calculate for the special case of a monatomic gas.