Answer to Question #169634 in Molecular Physics | Thermodynamics for karan saxena

Question

Two indistinguishable particles are to be placed in five cells. Enumerate the possible macrostates and the corresponding microstates. 

Answer 1

For two indistinguishable particles, a state before the particle exchange must be physically equivalent to the state after the exchange, so these two state differ at most by a complex phase factor.

If you had N coins. These are the constituents of your system and each has two possible states: heads (H) and tails (T). There are 2N possible microstates.

In place of state distributions, his macrostates specified the number of (distinguishable) elementary cells assigned k (indistinguishable) particles. His microstates, accordingly, did not further specify which particles are assigned to which cell, but rather, for each k , which cells are assigned k particles.