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Boltzmann's distribution is an exponential distribution. Boltzmann factor (vertical axis) as a function of temperature T for several energy differences ε i − ε j.. In statistical mechanics and mathematics, a Boltzmann distribution (also called Gibbs distribution [1]) is a probability distribution or probability measure that gives the probability that a system will be in a certain ...
The equation predicts that for short range interactions, the equilibrium velocity distribution will follow a Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. To the right is a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in which 900 hard sphere particles are constrained to move in a rectangle.
Despite the foregoing, there is a difference between the two quantities. The information entropy Η can be calculated for any probability distribution (if the "message" is taken to be that the event i which had probability p i occurred, out of the space of the events possible), while the thermodynamic entropy S refers to thermodynamic probabilities p i specifically.
The typical problem begins with a system for which the Hamiltonian is known, it is at a given temperature and it follows the Boltzmann statistics. To obtain the mean value of some macroscopic variable, say A, the general approach is to compute, over all the phase space, PS for simplicity, the mean value of A using the Boltzmann distribution:
Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics is used to derive the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution of an ideal gas. However, it can also be used to extend that distribution to particles with a different energy–momentum relation, such as relativistic particles (resulting in Maxwell–Jüttner distribution), and to other than three-dimensional spaces.
Boltzmann's equation—carved on his gravestone. [1]In statistical mechanics, Boltzmann's equation (also known as the Boltzmann–Planck equation) is a probability equation relating the entropy, also written as , of an ideal gas to the multiplicity (commonly denoted as or ), the number of real microstates corresponding to the gas's macrostate:
The general equation can then be written as [6] = + + (),. where the "force" term corresponds to the forces exerted on the particles by an external influence (not by the particles themselves), the "diff" term represents the diffusion of particles, and "coll" is the collision term – accounting for the forces acting between particles in collisions.
The proportionality constant k B is one of the fundamental constants of physics and is named the Boltzmann constant in honor of its discoverer. Boltzmann's entropy describes the system when all the accessible microstates are equally likely. It is the configuration corresponding to the maximum of entropy at equilibrium.