Supersymmetric quantum mechanics and statistical physics: Schrödinger-like thermodynamic equation

Abstract

Supersymmetric quantum mechanics (SUSY QM) is used to determine the class of potentials that are solvable as well as to find their isospectral partners. To do that SUSY QM assumes the knowledge of the Witten superpotential as a particular solution of the Riccati equation involved in order to obtain the corresponding generalizations. Consequently, due to the fact that in statistical mechanics the internal energy is indeed known as a single temperature derivative of the Helmholtz free energy, a simple transformation has been proposed here in order to get, in an heuristic way, a Schrödinger-like thermodynamic (SLT) equation. In this proposal, the quantum Witten superpotential and the wavefunction correspond, in statistical physics, to the internal energy and to the canonical partition function respectively. With that, it is shown how all the results from SUSY QM can be incorporated in the statistical case, to find the generalized internal energy and partition functions as well as to generalize all the other related thermodynamical properties. As an example of the usefulness of the proposed SLT equation, the case of Boltzmann statistics has been considered explicitly and it was found that the corresponding generalized internal energy contain, as a particular case, the Bose–Einstein or the Fermi–Dirac probability distributions.