Aum Sri Sai Ram

Statistical Mechanics
Course Code - PPHY 302
Lecture - 3
Illustration of microstates (Two-state model)

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Illustration of microstates (2 particles in a box)

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Some terminology
Ensemble

For a given macrostate (N,V,E), a statistical system, at any time t, is

equally likely to be in any one of an extremely large number of distinct
microstates.

As time passes, the system continually switches from one microstate to

another.

Over a reasonable span of time, all one observes is a behavior “averaged”

over the variety of microstates through which the system passes.
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Ensemble
It may, therefore, make sense if we consider, at a single
instant of time, a rather large number of systems — all being
some sort of “mental copies” of the given system — which are
characterized by the same macrostate as the original
system but are in all sorts of possible microstates.

This collection of systems is called an ensemble.

It is a mental construct.
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There are three main ensembles that tend to be used in thermal physics. 6
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Microcanonical Ensemble

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Consider two systems coupled in such a way that they can exchange
energy.

We will make one of them enormous, and call it the reservoir (also known
as a heat bath)

It is so large that you can take quite a lot of

energy out of it.

It can remain at essentially the same

temperature.
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The number of ways of arranging the quanta of energy of the reservoir will
therefore be colossal.

The system is small.

We will assume that for each allowed energy of the system there is only

a single microstate, and therefore the system always has a value of Ω

equal to one.

We fix the total energy of the system plus reservoir to be E.

The energy of the reservoir is taken to be E - e while the energy of the

system is taken to be e.
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Note: e is used to represent epsilon.
This situation of a system in thermal contact with a large reservoir is very
important and is known as the canonical ensemble.

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The probability distribution describing the system

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