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Conversely, two or more different states of a quantum mechanical system are said to be degenerate if they give the same value of energy upon measurement. The number of different states corresponding to a particular energy level is known as the degree of degeneracy (or simply the degeneracy) of the level.
While degeneracy pressure usually dominates at extremely high densities, it is the ratio between degenerate pressure and thermal pressure which determines degeneracy. Given a sufficiently drastic increase in temperature (such as during a red giant star's helium flash ), matter can become non-degenerate without reducing its density.
In quantum mechanics terminology, the degeneracy is said to be "lifted" by the presence of the magnetic field. In the presence of more than one unpaired electron, the electrons mutually interact to give rise to two or more energy states. Zero-field splitting refers to this lifting of degeneracy even in the absence of a magnetic field.
Degeneracy occurs whenever there exists a unitary operator that acts non-trivially on a ground state and commutes with the Hamiltonian of the system. According to the third law of thermodynamics , a system at absolute zero temperature exists in its ground state; thus, its entropy is determined by the degeneracy of the ground state.
In the case of degenerate energy levels, we can write the partition function in terms of the contribution from energy levels (indexed by j) as follows: =, where g j is the degeneracy factor, or number of quantum states s that have the same energy level defined by E j = E s.
In spectroscopy and quantum chemistry, the multiplicity of an energy level is defined as 2S+1, where S is the total spin angular momentum. [1] [2] ...
Neutrons are capable of producing an even higher degeneracy pressure, neutron degeneracy pressure, albeit over a shorter range. This can stabilize neutron stars from further collapse, but at a smaller size and higher density than a white dwarf.
This degeneracy is lifted when spin–orbit interaction is treated to higher order in perturbation theory, but still states with same |M S | are degenerate in a non-rotating molecule. We can speak of a 5 Σ 2 substate, a 5 Σ 1 substate or a 5 Σ 0 substate. Except for the case Ω = 0, these substates have a degeneracy of 2.