Degeneracy
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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Re: Degeneracy
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
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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Re: Degeneracy
The number of states that lead to the same outcome. The more there are, the more disordered the system is
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Re: Degeneracy
Degeneracy is the number of equal energy states. In thermodynamics, the more degeneracy increases, the more entropy there is.
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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Re: Degeneracy
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.
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