Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Defining Thermodynamic beta in dimension of time and temperature in dimension of frequency

+ 0 like - 1 dislike
3055 views

If I define Thermodynamic beta in unit of second. Does this mean that:

1. Boltzmann constant $k$ is unit-less?
2. $T$ is in units of frequency (Hz) or Kelvin $K$?

In this case, is defining Thermodynamic beta $\beta$ in unit of second a reason to make $\hbar$ unitless? To make $\hbar$ = 1 with no unit, which originally is $1.0545718 × 10^{-34} m^2 kg s^{-1}$, should Boltzmann constant $k$ be scaled appropriately?

This is the table of Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory and what I mentioned seems to belong to the hybrid case:

β=1/kT has the units of $J^{−1}$, so ℏβ has the units of s. Redefining a scaled version of the Boltzmann constant by 1/k′=ℏ/k  would give β′=1/k′T the units of s. However, when most of the time I would use ℏ independent of thermodynamic beta and vice versa. If I use ℏ=1, which is the cause of every scaling, setting k′=k/ℏ does work when ℏ and β is used together. But in classical statistical mechanics, no ℏ appears and β is used independently, why should β changed just because I want to set ℏ=1 unitless? 

Closed as per community consensus as the post is not graduate-level
asked Jun 29, 2016 in Closed Questions by diff (-5 points) [ revision history ]
recategorized Jun 30, 2016 by Dilaton

Voting to close as not graduate-level





user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...