The Mayer f-function is an auxiliary function that often appears in the series expansion of thermodynamic quantities related to classical many-particle systems.[1] It is named after chemist and physicist Joseph Edward Mayer.

Definition

edit

Consider a system of classical particles interacting through a pair-wise potential

 

where the bold labels   and   denote the continuous degrees of freedom associated with the particles, e.g.,

 

for spherically symmetric particles and

 

for rigid non-spherical particles where   denotes position and   the orientation parametrized e.g. by Euler angles. The Mayer f-function is then defined as

 

where   the inverse absolute temperature in units of energy−1 .

See also

edit

Notes

edit
  1. ^ Donald Allan McQuarrie, Statistical Mechanics (HarperCollins, 1976), page 228