On the Quantization of the Monoatomic Ideal Gas

From sand piles to electrons in metals, one of the greatest challenges in modern physics is to understand the behavior of an ensemble of strongly interacting particles. A class of quantum many-body systems such as neutron matter and cold Fermi gases share the same universal thermodynamic properties when interactions reach the maximum effective value allowed by quantum mechanics, the so-called unitary limit [1,2]. It is then possible to simulate some astrophysical phenomena in...

The current models of ideal Fermi gas and ideal Bose gas are often considered as compatible with quantum theory. In this work, however, it is shown that improvements should be introduced into these models to rigorously take into account the quantum nature of phase space which is related to the uncertainty principle. The construction of the improved models which are considered is based on the use of the concepts of phase space representation of quantum mechanics and quantum ph...

Chang and Bertsch [Phys. Rev. A 76, 021603(R) (2007)] proposed a simple formula for the ground state energy of a unitary Fermi gas in a harmonic trap, based on their Green's function Monte Carlo simulations of up to 22 fermions, combined with general assumptions about the universal thermodynamic behavior of the unitary Fermi gas. In this work, we perform the ab initio simulations of the ground state energy of up to one hundred fermions using the fictitious identical particle ...

One-dimensional world is very unusual as there is an interplay between quantum statistics and geometry, and a strong short-range repulsion between atoms mimics Fermi exclusion principle, fermionizing the system. Instead, a system with a large number of components with a single atom in each, on the opposite acquires many bosonic properties. We study the ground-state properties a multi-component Fermi gas trapped in a harmonic trap by fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method. We...

We study the statistics of the kinetic (or equivalently potential) energy for $N$ non-interacting fermions in a $1d$ harmonic trap of frequency $\omega$, at finite temperature $T$. Remarkably, we find an exact solution for the full distribution of the kinetic energy, at any temperature $T$ and for any $N$, using a non-trivial mapping to an integrable Calogero-Moser-Sutherland model. As a function of temperature $T$, and for large $N$, we identify: (i) a quantum regime, for $T...

We give an account of the appearance and first developments of the statistical model of atoms proposed by Thomas and Fermi, focusing on the main results achieved by Fermi and his group in Rome. Particular attention is addressed to the unknown contribution to this subject by Majorana, anticipating some important results reached later by leading physicists.

We consider the possible mechanical instability of an ultracold Fermi gas due to the attractive interactions between fermions of different species. We investigate how the instability, predicted by a mean field calculation for an homogeneous system, is modified when the gas is trapped in a harmonic potential and quantum effects are included.

Assuming the validity of grand canonical statistics, we study the properties of a spin-polarized Fermi gas in harmonic traps. Universal forms of Fermi temperature $T_F$, internal energy $U$ and the specific heat per particle of the trapped Fermi gas are calculated as a {\it function} of particle number, and the results compared with those of infinite number particles.

In this paper we find a connection between the macroscopic classical laws of gases and the quantum mechanical description of molecules, composing an ideal gas. In such a gas, the motion of each individual molecule can be considered independently on all other molecules, and thus the macroscopic parameters of ideal gas, like pressure P and temperature T, can be introduced as a result of simple averaging over all individual motions of molecules. It is shown that for an ideal gas...

In this paper I discuss Enrico Fermi's view of identical particles, taking a lecture that he gave in 1933 as a starting point. Fermi used his lecture as a basis for a paper that was published in 1934: the paper is in italian and is not easily accessible to a wide audience, and for this reason its translation is also given in a section of the present paper.