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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. The energy is replaced by the characteristic potential of that ensemble, the Gibbs Free Energy .
In other words, each single-particle level is a separate, tiny grand canonical ensemble. By the Pauli exclusion principle, there are only two possible microstates for the single-particle level: no particle (energy E = 0), or one particle (energy E = ε). The resulting partition function for that single-particle level therefore has just two terms:
The partition function is commonly used as a probability-generating function for expectation values of various functions of the random variables. So, for example, taking β {\displaystyle \beta } as an adjustable parameter, then the derivative of log ( Z ( β ) ) {\displaystyle \log(Z(\beta ))} with respect to β {\displaystyle \beta }
For now let us refer to these single-particle stationary states as orbitals (to avoid confusing these "states" with the total many-body state), with the provision that each possible internal particle property (spin or polarization) counts as a separate orbital. Each orbital may be occupied by a particle (or particles), or may be empty.
The normalization condition that the trace of be equal to 1 defines the partition function to be () = (). If the number of particles involved in the system is itself not certain, then a grand canonical ensemble can be applied, where the states summed over to make the density matrix are drawn from a Fock space .
In statistical mechanics, the translational partition function, is that part of the partition function resulting from the movement (translation) of the center of mass. For a single atom or molecule in a low pressure gas, neglecting the interactions of molecules , the canonical ensemble q T {\displaystyle q_{T}} can be approximated by: [ 1 ]
The denominator in equation 1 is a normalizing factor so that the ratios : add up to unity — in other words it is a kind of partition function (for the single-particle system, not the usual partition function of the entire system).
What has been presented above is essentially a derivation of the canonical partition function. As one can see by comparing the definitions, the Boltzmann sum over states is equal to the canonical partition function. Exactly the same approach can be used to derive Fermi–Dirac and Bose–Einstein statistics.