Particle Number (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The particle number, N, is the number of constituent particles in a thermodynamical system. The particle number is a fundamental parameter in thermodynamics and it is conjugate to the chemical potential.A constituent particle is one that cannot be broken into smaller pieces at the scale of energy k.T involved in the process (where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature). For example, for a thermodynamic system consisting of a piston containing water vapour, the particle number is the number of water molecules in the system. Our definition of elementary particle is thus temperature dependent.