On the generalization of statistical thermodynamic functions by a Riccati differential equation.

Abstract

In this work, we propose a non-linear differential equation of Riccati-type, where the standard partition function Z(T) is taken as its particular solution leading to their generalization Zg(T); from there, other related statistical thermodynamic functions are generalized. As an useful application of our proposal, other thermodynamic functions, namely, the internal energy, heat capacity, Helmholtz free energy and entropy, associated to the model of the ideal monatomic gas in D-dimensions are generalized. According to our results, thermodynamic properties derived from the standard partition functions by means of ordinary statistical mechanics are incomplete. In fact, although asymptotically with the increasing of temperature the generalized statistical thermodynamic functions reduce to the standard ones, these contain an extra term which is dominant at very low temperature indicating that standard findings should be corrected.