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Boltzmann's equation—carved on his gravestone. [1]In statistical mechanics, Boltzmann's equation (also known as the Boltzmann–Planck equation) is a probability equation relating the entropy, also written as , of an ideal gas to the multiplicity (commonly denoted as or ), the number of real microstates corresponding to the gas's macrostate:
The Birnbaum–Saunders distribution, also known as the fatigue life distribution, is a probability distribution used extensively in reliability applications to model failure times. The chi distribution. The noncentral chi distribution; The chi-squared distribution, which is the sum of the squares of n independent Gaussian random variables.
Treatments on statistical mechanics [2] [3] define a macrostate as follows: a particular set of values of energy, the number of particles, and the volume of an isolated thermodynamic system is said to specify a particular macrostate of it. In this description, microstates appear as different possible ways the system can achieve a particular ...
The grand potential Ω serves two roles: to provide a normalization factor for the probability distribution (the probabilities, over the complete set of microstates, must add up to one); and, many important ensemble averages can be directly calculated from the function Ω(µ, V, T).
Other partition functions for different ensembles divide up the probabilities based on other macrostate variables. As an example: the partition function for the isothermal-isobaric ensemble , the generalized Boltzmann distribution , divides up probabilities based on particle number, pressure, and temperature.
Despite the foregoing, there is a difference between the two quantities. The information entropy Η can be calculated for any probability distribution (if the "message" is taken to be that the event i which had probability p i occurred, out of the space of the events possible), while the thermodynamic entropy S refers to thermodynamic probabilities p i specifically.
The ensemble of microstates comprises a statistical distribution of probability for each microstate, and the group of most probable configurations accounts for the macroscopic state. Therefore, the system can be described as a whole by only a few macroscopic parameters, called the thermodynamic variables : the total energy E , volume V ...
Boltzmann's distribution is an exponential distribution. Boltzmann factor (vertical axis) as a function of temperature T for several energy differences ε i − ε j.. In statistical mechanics and mathematics, a Boltzmann distribution (also called Gibbs distribution [1]) is a probability distribution or probability measure that gives the probability that a system will be in a certain ...