2011-03-09
10:15 at HCI J 574

Thermodynamics of a small system in a mu,T reservoir

Dick Bedeaux

Department of Chemistry, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Due to advances in experimental techniques operating at the nanoscale, it is possible to compute properties from density fluctuations by studying ``snapshots'' of particle configurations. Thermodynamics on a small scale is different from thermodynamics in bulk systems. We show how the molar enthalpy and the inverse thermodynamic correction factor depend on system size and how these properties can be computed from fluctuations at the nanoscale. We find a one over size (1/L) effect for all thermodynamic quantities for a small system in contact with a &mu,T reservoir, where L is the length of the system in a single dimension.