Question

1. What is the difference between heat capacity, specific heat, and latent heat? 2. Explain what is physically meant by "Degrees of Freedom" and the "Equipartition Theorem".

Answer 1

Answer:

1.

- Heat capacity is defined as the total amount of heat required to increase the temperature of a substance in 1°C.

- Specific heat is defined as the total amount of heat required to increase the temperature of a substance in 1°C per unit mass. Hence this property depends of the mass of the substance.

- Latent heat is the amount of energy absorbed or released by a substance in a phase change (physical change) without a change in temperature.

2.

- Degrees of freedom is the number of parameters that define the configuration of a system. For example, in a system with we want to know about the dynamic in the three dimension x,y,z and also about the rotation around a fixed axe we have four degrees of freedom.

- Equipartition theorem relates the temperature of a system with the average energy of the system (this average is taken for those degrees of freedom that appears quadratically).

I hope this is useful for you

regards