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SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STATISTICAL QUANTUM MECHANICS OF A SYSTEM OF INTERACTING PARTICLES

Claude Bloch

Published Jun 1, 1962• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Field theoretical methods are applied to the calculation of the partition function of macroscopic systems of interacting particles. Perturbation calculations are carried out in the second-quantization formalism, in powers of the interaction. (T.F.H.)

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The partition function, a fundamental tenet in statistical thermodynamics, contains in principle all thermodynamic information about a system. It encapsulates both microscopic information through the quantum energy levels and statistical information from the partitioning of the particles among the available energy levels. For identical particles, this statistical accounting is complicated by the symmetry requirements of the allowed quantum states. In particular, for Fermi systems, the enforcement of the Pauli principle is typically a numerically demanding task, responsible for much of the cost of the calculations. The interplay of these three elements---the structure of the many-body spectrum, the statistical partitioning of the NNN particles among the available levels, and the enforcement of the Pauli principle---drives the behavior of mesoscopic and macroscopic Fermi systems. In this paper, we develop an approach for the determination of the partition function, a numerically difficult task, for systems of strongly interacting identical fermions and apply it to a model system of harmonically confined, harmonically interacting fermions. This approach uses a recently introduced many-body method that is an extension of the symmetry-invariant perturbation method (SPT) originally developed for bosons. It uses group theory and graphical techniques to avoid the heavy computational demands of conventional many-body methods which typically scale exponentially with the number of particles. The SPT application of the Pauli principle is trivial to implement since it is done ``on paper'' by imposing restrictions on the normal-mode quantum numbers at first order in the perturbation. The method is applied through first order and represents an extension of the SPT method to excited states. Our method of determining the partition function and various thermodynamic quantities is accurate and efficient and has the potential to yield interesting insight into the role played by the Pauli principle and the influence of large degeneracies on the emergence of the thermodynamic behavior of large-NNN systems.
The Statistical Mechanics of the N-particle system is derived from Quantum Random Field Theory. An asymptotically measure preserving, flow operator has been obtained from the QFT evolution operator. A basic assumption is that the field Lagrangian is a generalized, infinitely divisible random field, and the interaction Hamiltonian varies in time in a step-wise manner at the transition lattice space-time points. Macroscopic boundary conditions are imposed on the wave functions. The density matrix, the partition function, the Bose-Einstein, the Fermi-Dirac distributions and the thermodynamic temperature follow. The equilibrium or non-equilibrium temperature have been obtained as functionals of the interaction Hamiltonian. The chemical potential has also been derived from the theory.