STATISTICAL PHYSICS: COMPUTATIONAL ASSIGNMENT III

D UE DATE
This assignment is due Wednesday, June 21, 23:59.

H ANDING IN THE ASSIGNMENTS

Submission of the notebooks (1 per problem) is done on Brightspace (one submission per group!)
Your last submission counts. MAKE SURE THAT, E.G., ONE DAY BEFORE THE DEADLINE, YOUR
GROUP HAS ALREADY A NEAR-FINAL VERSION HANDED IN!!!
Wrap all notebook files into a single zip file. This file should be named using the net ID and
student NUMBER of the people in your group, as follows:
statfys_x_ID_NUMBER_ID_NUMBER.zip
where the x stands for the number of the session. A similar notation is to be used for groups con-
sisting of 1 or 3 students.

1. T HE QUANTUM WELL
Consider an ideal one-dimensional quantum well where the potential, V (x), is 0 between x = 0
and x = L and infinite elsewhere. Consider fermions with no spin degeneracy.
(1) (5 points) What are the quantum states and the corresponding energies?
Your report contains an expression of the wave functions and the energies.

(2) (10 points) Determine the energies of the lowest 10000 states and store them in an array.
The energy should be in units of ×2 /(2mL 2 ). Throughout this exercise this factor can be
taken as unity. Make a histogram of the results by creating energy bins of a certain width.
Chose the bin width wisely such that the histogram is not too noisy and that that the results
are not overly smoothed.
Hint: You may want to use the histrogram function in numpy.
Your report contains the histogram.

(3) (10 points) Determine the analytical form of the density of states, g (²), of this system.
Your report contains the previous plot but now including the analytical result as well.

(4) (6 points) Express the Fermi energy, ²F , in terms of the number of particles in the system
N . What is the significance of this energy?
Your report contains the calculation of the Fermi energy and an explanation.

(5) (3 points) Does the chemical potential, µ, increase or decrease as T rises?

Your report contains the explanation.

1
2 STATISTICAL PHYSICS: COMPUTATIONAL ASSIGNMENT III

2. F ERMI -D IRAC STATISTICS

The occupation probability of finding a quantum mechanical system containing fermions in a
quantum state s with energy E s is given by the Fermi-Dirac distribution

1
fF D = , (1)
e β(E s −µ) + 1

where µ is the chemical potential and β = 1/k B T as usual.

(6) (4 points) Show that the Fermi-Dirac distribution never exceeds 1. What is the physics be-
hind this observation? Your report includes the argumentation

(7) (6 points) Now we assume that we have a system with energy spectrum, E k = k²; k = 0, 1, 2...,
where ² is taken as unity. Assume we have 7 fermions. Specify the ground state and what is
the corresponding energy?
Remember: There can be only zero or one particle in each energy state.
Hint: You can easily specify a micro-state by a ’row’ where each column represents an en-
ergy state and put a ’x’ or ’1’ at an occupied energy level, and a blank for an empty energy
level.

(8) (10 points) Now we assume the system is in an excited state with 4 energy units above the
ground state. Provide all possible microstates. How many are there? You will find that the
lowest energy state is always occupied and above k = 10, the states are always empty. The
occupation of level k = 0 is therefore equal to 1 and the occupuation for k = 11 and above
is zero. Calculate the occupation for all other levels and plot them as a function of the level
energy E k .
Your report should include the microstates and the occupancies and a plot of the occupan-
cies.

(9) (12 points) Thus far this was done by hand. Next we will make the system bigger and use
Python to do our dirty work. For the case of N available energy levels, there are 2N pos-
sible microstates (each occupied or not). Looping over all microstates can be done by the
itertools package (use import itertools). In particular, you could use for microstate
in itertools.product(range(2), repeat=N):. Not all of the microstates are admis-
sible as the total number of fermions is fixed (lower than N) and the energy is also fixed.
Hence for each microstate you need to check whether the state is admissible (so has the
right number of fermions and correct total energy) or not. If it is not, it can be ignored. Use
your algorithm to find all admissible microstates and how many there are for the case of 20
fermions and a surplus energy of ∆E = 8. How many admissible states are there? Plot the
occupation of the levels as function of the level energy.
Hint: As earlier, first determine the maximum relevant energy state.
Hint: Check your code on the previous assignment first to make sure you obtain the same
answer as you got by hand.
Warning: The code will take a bit of time to run (a minute or so).
Your report lists the number of admissible states and a plot of the occupation leves as func-
tion of the level energy.
 STATISTICAL PHYSICS: COMPUTATIONAL ASSIGNMENT III 3

3. L OW T BEHAVIOR
Let us consider a gas of N identical bosons confined by some potential. The energy levels are
²n = nh f where n = 0, 1, 2, . . . and f is the oscillator frequency. The degeneracy of level n is (n +
1)(n + 2)(n + 3)/2. The number of particles in a Bose-Einstein system can be written as a sum over
all states, s
X 1
N= (² −µ)/kT
(2)
all s e s −1
(10) (3 points) Introduce the following dimensionless variables: t = kT /h f and c = µ/h f and
rewrite the sum in terms of these new variables.
Your report contains the rewrite.

(11) (10 points) From now on we consider N = 60000. Write a Python program that can perform
the discrete sum for given t and c. Put the coding in a function for convenience. The dis-
crete sum is restricted by performing the summation up to a value n max only. For t = 15
determine c by trial and error. Be certain to take a sufficient number of energy levels into
account. For the correct c, plot N as function of the number of energy levels taken into
account to show convergence of the sum.
Your report contains the plot of N versus the number of energy levels in the sum and the con-
verged value of c.

(12) (5 points) Plot the number of particles in each energy level versus the energy level for t = 15.
Your report contains the plot.

(13) (5 points) Repeat the analysis of the above steps for t = 14, 13, 12, 11, 10. Provide a plot of c
versus t and plots of the occupancy of the various energy levels.
Your report contains a plot values of c versus t and occupancy plots for all mentioned values
of t .

Submit this assignment following the instructions on the first page.