Degeneracy

[Junghyuk_Park_1I]

What exactly is degeneracy conceptually? How is it applied in thermodynamics?

[Chem_Mod]

degeneracy describes the number of states at a specific energy, each state has a different orientation or placement of molecule, but the energy remains the same.

[Asia Yamada 2B]

Degeneracy is the number of ways of achieving a given energy state. This is applied to thermodynamics because it’s related to entropy. As degeneracy increases, there is more disorder and therefore has more entropy.

[JasmineCap1A]

Example from lecture: 2 atoms in a flask with two same states (L&R). You can have AB both on the left, AB both on the right, A on the left while B is on the right or A on the right side while B is on the left. The degeneracy is w=4, because we have the number of states raised to the power of the # on particles, n. So it would be w= 2^2=4. If there was only one atom, it would be w=2^1=2.

[Nishka Vipul 1J]

Degeneracy is essentially the number of possible equal energy states.

[Astha Sahoo 3I]

It's basically how many states a molecule has with equal energy. In most problems it's given, but for some like NO it's easily figured out that there's only two states because it can only be orientated N-O or O-N

[Neel Bonthala 2G]

When I think about degeneracy, or at least calculating w, I always think about it as the number of possible states the molecule can exist in raised to the amount that is present. So if there is one mole present, the number of possible states would be raised by avagadro's number: 6.022x10^23 molecules.

[Pranav Daggubati 3C]

The number of states that lead to the same outcome. The more there are, the more disordered the system is

[Anthony_Sandoval_1D]

Degeneracy is the number of equal energy states. In thermodynamics, the more degeneracy increases, the more entropy there is.

[magalysantos_1F]

We can think of it in terms of a molecule, where its bonds are flexible and can be positioned a number of ways, increasing degeneracy; this is because it is the number of microstates, or positions, which in turn increases entropy.

[Madeline Ogden 3B]

To add onto what previous comments have said, the reason that entropy increases as degeneracy increases is due to positional disorder. The more energy states there are, the more possible positions there are for molecules to be in, hence more potential disorder is possible.

[Pratika Nagpal]

What are some examples of questions we could get asked about degeneracy.