CRC Press eBooks
The Grand Canonical Ensemble
Jonathan Allday, Simon Hands
Abstract
We developed a reasonably detailed and comprehensive understanding of boson and fermion statistics from the previous chapter. While this is interesting physics in itself, more important for us is an understand of how the symmetry properties of these particles impact on the entropy associated with them. In this chapter, we start by considering situations where the number of particles in a system is not fixed. Next, the theory developed is used to derive quantum statistics again, but this time without recourse to various approximations. Access to the requisite probability functions enables the Gibbs entropy to be calculated for fermions and bosons .