Teaching the photon gas in introductory physics

American Journal of Physics

Volumn 70, Issue 8, 2002, Pages 792-797

  Leff, Harvey S ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646665645     PISSN: 00029505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1119/1.1479743     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Weak interactions must exist in order for the gas to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium. It is assumed that these interactions have negligible effects on the equations of state.
2. The term "photon" was coined by Gilbert N. Lewis, "The conservation of photons," Nature (London) 118, 874-875 (1926).
3. See Lawrence A. Coleman, Donald F. Holcomb, and John S. Rigden, "The introductory university physics project 1987-1995: What has it accomplished,?" Am. J. Phys. 66, 124-137 (1998), and references therein.
4. Stephen T. Thornton and Andrew F. Rex, Modern Physics, 2nd ed. (Saunders College Publishing, New York, 2000), pp. 91-96, 296-298.
5. David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995), pp. 216-218, 311-312.
6. Eugene Hecht, Optics (Addison-Wesley Longman, Reading, MA, 1998), pp. 50-57, 575-583.
7. C. J. Adkins, Equilibrium Thermodynamics (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1968), pp. 146-159.
8. Ralph Baierlein, Thermal Physics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999), pp. 116-130.
9. Ashley H. Carter, Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics (Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001), pp. 186-190.
10. Daniel V. Schroeder, An Introduction to Thermal Physics (Addison-Wesley, New York, 2000), pp. 288-307.
11. Keith Stowe, Introduction to Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics (Wiley, New York, 1984), Chap. 26.
12. Raj K. Pathria, Statistical Mechanics, 2nd ed. (Butterworth-Heineman, Oxford, 1996), Appendixes B, D, E.
13. Daniel J. Amit and Yosef Verbin, Statistical Physics: An Introductory Course (World Scientific, Singapore, 1995). Relevant kinetic theory is discussed in Part I, Chap. 1, and the photon gas is discussed in Part IV, Chap. 4.
14. Harvey S. Leff (in preparation).
15. Students of introductory physics do not typically encounter enthalpy in their courses, and the discussion in the text can be skipped. On the other hand, students are introduced to enthalpy in their chemistry courses, and the discussion in the text might help them appreciate, if not fully understand, enthalpy in a wider context.
16. See Ref. 10, p. 33.
17. In Eq. (11), the prefactor 60.4 in r arises from an integral, which gives 8π(3)Γ(3)=60.4. Here ̄(3) and Γ(3) are zeta and gamma functions, respectively.
18. Edward Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), Chap. 17.
19. E. H. Kennard, Kinetic Theory of Gases (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1938), Sec. 37.
20. The assumption of elastic collisions does not hold for walls that can absorb and emit photons. In that case, however, isotropy guarantees that Eq. (Al) still holds because the average number of photons coming from a wall section in any time interval must equal the number approaching the wall, and the average momentum approaching must equal the average momentum leaving. The mathematical treatment used for elastic collisions thus holds in an average sense when inelastic collisions occur, and isouropy holds.