A correspondence from renormalized frequency to heat capacity for particles in an anharmonic potential

TL;DR

This paper explores the theoretical link between renormalized oscillation frequency and heat capacity in particles within anharmonic potentials, revealing a perturbative correspondence between mechanical and statistical descriptions.

Contribution

It establishes a novel order-by-order correspondence between frequency renormalization and heat capacity corrections in anharmonic systems.

Findings

Perturbative series for frequency and heat capacity are directly related.

The correspondence contrasts with the intuition that renormalized frequency is a single quantity.

Provides a theoretical framework connecting mechanics and statistical physics in anharmonic systems.

Abstract

For particles in an anharmonic potential, classical mechanics asserts that there is a renormalization of the bare frequency of the oscillatory motion, and statistical mechanics claims that the anharmonicity causes a correction to the heat capacity of an ideal gas composed of particles in the anharmonic potential. When the frequency and the heat capacity are expressed in perturbative series, respective, in terms of the characteristic lengths in mechanics and statistical physics, the expansion coefficients have an order-by-order correspondence. This correspondence is in contrast to our intuition that the renormalized frequency enters the statistical mechanics as a single quantity.