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Updated: Jun 30, 2026

Spatial Separation of Molecular Conformers and Clusters
Published on: January 9, 2014
Partition function of a spinor gas
1Departement Natuurkunde, Universiteit Antwerpen RUCA, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020 Antwerpen, Belgium.
Abstract:
For a spinor gas, i.e., a mixture of identical particles with several internal degrees of freedom, we derive the partition function in terms of the Feynman-Kac functionals of polarized components. As an example we study a spin-1 Bose gas with the spins subjected to an external magnetic field and confined by a parabolic potential. From the analysis of the free energy for a finite number of particles, we find that the specific heat of this ideal spinor gas as a function of temperature has two maxima: one is related to a Schottky anomaly, due to the lifting of the spin degeneracy by the external field, the other maximum is the signature of Bose-Einstein condensation.
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