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Sharpness

The document discusses how the probability distribution of macrostates narrows as the number of particles in interacting systems increases. It shows probability distributions for systems with 500, 5000, and 50,000 total particles, noting the peak becomes sharper. To verify this quantitatively, measurements could be taken to see if the distribution width decreases as the particle number grows. Larger real systems than modeled here would require approximations, as directly computing probabilities would be impractical for Avogadro's number of particles.

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Fakhare Alam
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31 views

Sharpness

The document discusses how the probability distribution of macrostates narrows as the number of particles in interacting systems increases. It shows probability distributions for systems with 500, 5000, and 50,000 total particles, noting the peak becomes sharper. To verify this quantitatively, measurements could be taken to see if the distribution width decreases as the particle number grows. Larger real systems than modeled here would require approximations, as directly computing probabilities would be impractical for Avogadro's number of particles.

Uploaded by

Fakhare Alam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SHAPRNESS OF THE PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION

We have learned that computing the total number of available microstates is an important element in
understanding thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. To understand the outcomes of interact-
ing systems, we need to be able to determine which macrostates are the most probable results of the
interaction.

Consider the situation presented in the text, system A with 300 particles interacts with system B of
200 particles sharing a total of 100 units of energy. As the text demonstrates, there are
9.27 *10115 microstates available to the interacting system. We can compute the probability of each
of the 101 possible resulting macrostates and produce the following graph:

0.07

0.06

0.05

0.04

0.03

0.02

0.01

20 40 60 80 100

This graphs shows the probability of finding a particular macrostate as a function of the energy
stored in system A. Notice that the maximum probability occurs for qa = 60, and that the value of
this maximum probability is just greater than 0.07.

Now, suppose we ask, what would this probability distribution look like if we increased all the
parameters by a factor of 10? In other words, what is the distribution of the 1001 possible
macrostates if now system A has 3000 particles, system B has 2000 particles, and the interacting
system has a total of 1000 units of energy? Computing these probabilities, we obtain:
2 sharpness.nb

0.020

0.015

0.010

0.005

200 400 600 800 1000

Notice that now the maximum probability occurs at qa = 600 as you might have expected. Let’s
consider these two graphs and ask what if any similarities exist between them? What differences
are there?

What do you think a graph of even more particles would look like? Below is the graph for the case
where system A has 30,000 particles, system B has 20,000 particles, and the total energy is 10,000
units of energy. (This took a while for Mathematica to produce):

0.007

0.006

0.005

0.004

0.003

0.002

0.001

5000 6000 7000 8000

One of the things you might have noticed is that the peak of the probability distribution becomes
narrower as the number of particles increases, indicating that the only likely resulting macrostates
are those in the vicinity of the maximum probability.

How can we be sure that the narrowing of the peak is real and not just an artifact of the scale of the
axes? Think of some quantitative measurements that we could make to determine whether the
distribution is in fact narrowing.

Finally, while the differences between these three graphs demonstrate the behavior of larger sys-
tems, we need also to keep in mind that any real system we consider will have many more particles
than the 50,000 considered in our largest case here. Section 2.4 of the text will teach us the mathe-
matical tools needed to approximate such large systems, since you would wait a long time for any
computer to produce these curves for a system of Avogardro’s number of particles.

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