On the Early Stages of Condensation of Rare-Gas Type Molecules

Abstract

The early stages of condensation are treated from the standpoint of the associative equilibrium of single molecules and stable molecular aggregates. Formulas are presented for partition functions from which one can calculate standard chemical potentials and concentrations of specified configurations of up to 8 molecules having a Lennard‐Jones (6–12) interaction. Numerical results are given for nitrogen. It appears that nitrogen aggregate concentrations fall steeply with decreasing temperature. Results of this procedure, using a restricted region of phase space, are compared with those obtained with no restrictions for 2 and 3 molecule aggregates.