Heat Capacity

of heat is transferred. It is also not necessary to be concerned with molar concentrations since ratios are being measured. As would be expected, argon is in most agreement with the equipartition theory; small discrepancies can be attributed to experimental uncertainties. A major reason for this agreement is the fact that argon exits as a monatomic gas, where there are no vibrational or rotational modes. There is no concern that the low temperature employed would hinder it’s access to allowed degrees of freedom. Nitrogen, on the other hand is affected greatly by the fact that this experiment was conducted at room temperature. Rotation requires less energy, causing a decent level of contribution from it, but vibrational modes are, at best, partially activated at 25C. There are a number of factors that decide the of extent vibrational contribution to heat capacity ratios. Nitrogen gas consists of two nitrogen atoms connected by a triple bond that bares a force constant of 2,243 N/m. This triple bond requires a lot of energy to oscillate and would require extremely high temperatures to have complete activity from this vibrational mode. Since nitrogen gas is a diatomic molecule, it only undergoes stretches that vibrate at low frequencies, which contribute less to  at low temperatures. It seems that nitrogen is not a good candidate for this experiment and behaves less ideally than argon under the circumstances. An aspect that is disturbing is the fact that the experimental value for it’s heat capacity falls lower that the theoretical one calculated that takes vibrational modes into account. Considering that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that vibrational modes are not fully activated, there has to be a reason for this unexpected result. The unexplained may just lie completely in the realm of experimental error, a trivial explanation none the less. It could be possible that resonance varies t...