Rotational and vibrational energy of molecules

Thermal energy, the energy contained in the heat of a chemical substance, is essentially the translational energy of molecules. There are two forms of kinetic energy which play an important role in photophysics the rotational and vibrational energies of molecules. 

The subject of statistical mechanics is a branch of mechanics which has been found very useful in the discussion of the properties of complicated systems, such as a gas. In the following sections we shall give a brief discussion of the fundamental theorem of statistical quantum mechanics (Sec. 49a), its application to a simple system (Sec. 496), the Boltzmann distribution law (Sec. 49c), Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics (Sec. 49d), the rotational and vibrational energy of molecules (Sec. 49e), and the dielectric constant of a diatomic dipole gas (Sec. 49/). The discussion in these sections is mainly descriptive and elementary we have made no effort to carry through the difficult derivations or to enter into the refined arguments needed in a... 

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