PRESSURE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE SPHERICAL CELLULAR MODEL AND THE THOMAS FERMI MODEL

George A. Baker, Jr.

University of California, Los Alamos

I have found an interesting feature of the pressure as produced by the spherical cellular model. Except for hydrogen, for low to moderate temperatures and densities, the pressure can exceed that of the ideal Fermi gas very significantly. It has been shown previously that for certain types of attractive potentials that this result is possible. This effect is seen in the spherical cellular in part of the one-phase region, as the observed critical temperatures for a number of elements are all less than 2 eV. There is a physical explanation for this pressure phenomenon. As the electrons descend into the nuclear potential well, they move faster and faster which motion results in larger and larger momentum transfer at the surface of the sphere. That means that the pressure can be quite large. On the other hand as I show, the pressure for the widely used Thomas-Fermi model is always less than or equal to that for the ideal gas. This disparity in theoretical results may have very significant effects in some practical applications. It is, I think, of considerable interest to resolve whether in actual physical systems this feature occurs.