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Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in chemical systems in terms of the principles, practices, and concepts of physics such as motion, energy, force, time, thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics, analytical dynamics and chemical equilibria.
Informally, however, a difference in the energy of a system that occurs solely because of a difference in its temperature is commonly called heat, and the energy that flows across a boundary as a result of a temperature difference is "heat". Altitude (or elevation) is usually not a thermodynamic property.
In thermodynamics, the chemical potential of a species is the energy that can be absorbed or released due to a change of the particle number of the given species, e.g. in a chemical reaction or phase transition.
Chemical energy is the energy that can be released when chemical substances undergo a transformation through a chemical reaction. Breaking and making chemical bonds involves energy release or uptake, often as heat that may be either absorbed by or evolved from the chemical system.
For example, the working fluid in a steam engine sitting on top of Mount Everest has higher total energy due to gravity than it has at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but the same thermodynamic potentials. This is because the gravitational potential energy belongs to the total energy rather than to thermodynamic potentials such as internal ...
While at the interface of physics and chemistry, chemical physics is distinct from physical chemistry as it focuses more on using physical theories to understand and explain chemical phenomena at the microscopic level, such as quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and molecular dynamics. Meanwhile, physical chemistry uses a broader range of ...
Magnetic potential energy is the form of energy related not only to the distance between magnetic materials, but also to the orientation, or alignment, of those materials within the field. For example, the needle of a compass has the lowest magnetic potential energy when it is aligned with the north and south poles of the Earth's magnetic field.
By the principle of minimum energy, there are a number of other state functions which may be defined which have the dimensions of energy and which are minimized according to the second law under certain conditions other than constant entropy. These are called thermodynamic potentials. For each such potential, the relevant fundamental equation ...