chemical potential

American  

noun

Thermodynamics.

1. a quantity that determines the transport of matter from one phase to another: a component will flow from one phase to another when the chemical potential of the component is greater in the first phase than in the second.

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chemical potential British  

noun

1.  μ.  a thermodynamic function of a substance in a system that is the partial differential of the Gibbs function of the system with respect to the number of moles of the substance

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Example Sentences

The equations that describe physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system -- temperature or chemical potential, for example -- can be known exactly.

From Science Daily

A crucial step in the authors’ experiment was tuning the photons’ chemical potential — a quantity that characterizes the energy that can be absorbed or released by a change in the number of photons.

From Nature

Photons are, in general, thought to have a chemical potential of zero.

From Nature

However, a non-zero chemical potential can occur in a system in which emission or absorption of photons is associated with a change in the number of other particles that have non-zero chemical potentials.

From Nature

The peculiarity of this correlation translates into a chemical potential of photons that equals the difference in the chemical potentials of occupied and vacant electronic states — a quantity that is proportional to the applied voltage5.

From Nature