The Mayer f-function is an auxiliary function that often appears in the series expansion of thermodynamic quantities related to classical many-particle systems.[1] It is named after chemist and physicist Joseph Edward Mayer.

Definition

Consider a system of classical particles interacting through a pair-wise potential

where the bold labels and denote the continuous degrees of freedom associated with the particles, e.g.,

for spherically symmetric particles and

for rigid non-spherical particles where denotes position and the orientation parametrized e.g. by Euler angles. The Mayer f-function is then defined as

where the inverse absolute temperature in units of energy−1 .

See also

Notes

  1. Donald Allan McQuarrie, Statistical Mechanics (HarperCollins, 1976), page 228
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