Monday, 9 November 2020

thermodynamics - Temperature below absolute zero?


I saw this Nature article today, which cites e.g. arXiv:1211.0545.


And it makes no sense to me. The temperature of a collection of particles is the average kinetic energy of those particles. Kinetic energy cannot be less than zero (as far as I'm aware), so I don't understand what this article is trying to say, unless they're playing around with the conventional definition of "temperature".


The only thing I can thing of is if you have something like:


$$\frac{1}{kT} ~=~ \left(\frac{\partial S}{\partial E}\right)_{N,V}$$


And they've created a situation where entropy decreases with increasing energy.




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