Thermodynamic equivalence of certain ideal Bose and Fermi gases

Abstract

It has been established recently that there is an interesting thermodynamic “equivalence” between noninteracting Bose and spinless Fermi gases in two dimensions, and between one-dimensional Bose and Fermi systems with linear dispersion, both in the grand-canonical ensemble. These are known to be special cases of a larger class of equivalences of noninteracting systems having an energy-independent single-particle density of states (DOS). Furthermore, the thermodynamic equivalence has also been established for any noninteracting quantum gas with a discrete ladder-type spectrum in the canonical ensemble. Here we investigate the intriguing possibility that the equivalence for systems with a constant DOS is a special case of a more general equivalence between noninteracting Bose and Fermi gases with a discrete ladder-type spectrum in the grand-canonical ensemble, which reduces to the constant-DOS case when the level-spacing approaches zero. By direct numerical calculation of the Bose and Fermi grand-canonical free energies, we conclude that the grand-canonical equivalence does not apply to the ladder-spectrum case.