Indistinguishability, symmetrisation and maximum entropy

Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation W T Grandy Jr 1981 Eur. J. Phys. 2 86 DOI 10.1088/0143-0807/2/2/005

0143-0807/2/2/86

Abstract

It is demonstrated that the distributions over single-particle states for Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein, and Fermi-Dirac statistics describing N non-interacting identical particles follow directly from the principle of maximum entropy. It is seen that the notions of indistinguishability and coarse graining are secondary, if not irrelevant. A detailed examination of the structure of the Boltzmann limit is provided.

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10.1088/0143-0807/2/2/005