Studies in Nonequilibrium Rate Processes. I. The Relaxation of a System of Harmonic Oscillators

摘要

As a part of an investigation of nonequilibrium phenomena in chemical kinetics a theoretical study has been made of the collisional and radiative relaxation of a system of harmonic oscillators contained in a constant temperature heat bath and prepared initially in a vibrational nonequilibrium distribution. An exact solution has been obtained for the general relaxation equation applicable to this system and expressions have been derived for the relaxation of initial Boltzmann distributions, Poisson distributions, and dgr;hyphen;function distributions as well as for the relaxation of the moments of the distributions. Using the latter result, explicit expressions are given for the relaxation of the internal energy of the system of oscillators and for the time dependence of the dispersion of the distributions.