A systematic treatment to check adiabatic invariance of phase volume in some easy cases is presented. Systems are classified and studied according to whether or not their Hamiltonian functions depend explicitly on external parameters. When the Hamiltonian function does not depend explicitly on external parameters, some extra hypotheses about the nature of the field of forces in the neighborhood of the walls are needed. In this situation two alternative methods are proposed. One of them uses the virial theorem, the other one uses a kinetic approach.
Topics
Rigid body dynamics
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© 1982 American Association of Physics Teachers.
1982
American Association of Physics Teachers
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