Thermodynamics of partially confined Fermi gases at low temperatures

Alhun Aydin, Altuğ Şişman

David J. Toms

We examine the behaviour of non-interacting Fermi gases at low temperature. If there is a confining potential present the thermodynamic behaviour is altered from the familiar results for the unconfined gas. The role of de Haas–van Alphen type oscillations that are a consequence of the confining potential is considered. Attention is concentrated on the behaviour of the chemical potential and the specific heat. Results are compared and contrasted with those for an unconfined and a totally confined gas.

Frédéric Chevy, Ch Salomon

Alfred Ford

Wu-Sheng Dai, Mi Xie

In this paper, we calculate the equations of state and the thermodynamic quantities for two- and three-dimensional hard-sphere Bose and Fermi gases in finite-size containers. The approach we used to deal with interacting gases is to convert the effect of interparticle hard-sphere interaction to a kind of boundary effect, and then the problem of a confined hard-sphere quantum gas is converted to the problem of a confined ideal quantum gas with a complex boundary. For this purpose, we first develop an approach for calculating the boundary effect on d-dimensional ideal quantum gases and then calculate the equation of state for confined quantum hard-sphere gases. The thermodynamic quantities and their low-temperature and high-density expansions are also given. In higher-order contributions, there are cross terms involving both the influences of the boundary and of the interparticle interaction. We compare the effect of the boundary and the effect of the interparticle interaction. Our result shows that, at low temperatures and high densities, the ratios of the effect of the boundary to the effect of the interparticle interaction in two dimensions are essentially different to those in three dimensions: in two dimensions, the ratios for Bose systems and for Fermi systems are the same and are independent of temperatures, while in three dimensions, the ratio for Bose systems depends on temperatures, but the ratio for Fermi systems is independent of temperatures. Moreover, for three-dimensional Fermi cases, compared with the contributions from the boundary, the contributions from the interparticle interaction to entropies and specific heats are negligible.

Altuğ Şişman, Jonas Fransson

Temperature-Induced Quantum Migration (TIQM) is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon that fundamentally reshapes the local thermodynamics of confined systems. While previously explored in Maxwell-Boltzmann and Bose gases, we here extend the TIQM framework to noninteracting Fermi gases confined in anisometric rectangular domains. These domains are characterized by D_{I}, representing the number of dimensions that remain unconfined. We derive the local heat capacity and demonstrate that the standard temperature derivative of local energy yields unphysical negative regions, a discrepancy resolved by the TIQM correction. We show that quantum degeneracy in Fermi gases generally suppresses the TIQM contribution to global heat capacity compared to other statistics, yet it drives a distinct redistribution of local heat capacity. Notably, for the most constrained case (D_{I}=0), a Schottky-type anomaly emerges at low densities, which is progressively "washed out" by increasing dimensionality (D_{I}=1,2). Based on an idealized noninteracting model, our calculations suggest that a measurable (22%) enhancement in the local-to-global electronic heat capacity ratio could emerge at approximately 84 nm from the longitudinal boundaries of a 12×12×5600 nm^{3} bismuth nanowire at 30 K, offering a potential experimental signature for TIQM. These results complete a systematic trilogy of studies across all fundamental quantum statistics, establishing TIQM as a necessary correction for the local thermodynamics of nanoscale devices.