Wednesday 17 February 2021

Microstates and macrostates

 I have been working on my energy level analysis following the wording I got from a set of lecture notes I was given. We started with 6 particles on Level 1

I understand that this would be a macrostate. All six particles are on this one level and there is no other way to achieve this state. There are six quanta of energy.
Here's a second macrostate. It is possibe to have one particle on Level 6 and the rest on Level 0. There are still six quanta of energy.
But this time is is possible to have different numbered particles as the one on Level 6, for example:

These are wqhat I am taking to be microstates, different ways of ordering the same particles into the same larger overall pattern. There will be 6 microstates for this macrostate.