Quantum fluids

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

Jump to: navigation, search


This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Talk
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
 
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Quantum_fluids&printable=yes
This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited but you can help to improve it. These unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer.

A quantum fluid is a fluid where the mean distance between the particles is less than or comparable to the thermal de Broglie wavelength

\Lambda = h / \sqrt{(2 \pi m k T)},

where

\, h is Planck's constant
\, m is the mass of the particles of the fluid
\, k is the Boltzmann constant and
\, T is the absolute temperature.

In such a case there is a strong overlap of wave functions of adjacent particles and hence quantum statistics (Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac) is applicable. This often results in unusual observable macroscopic phenomena, such as superfluidity, superconductivity and other 'super' transport phenomena.

Reference

Retrieved from "http://reid.citizendium.org/wiki/Quantum_fluids"
Views
Personal tools