| ▲ | dgoldstein0 4 hours ago | |
Negative temperature happens in physical systems when there's a constrained state space and energy in the system comes near the maximum - as then adding energy reduces the number of possible states the molecules are in. Iirc the math works because temperature is the inverse of the derivative of entropy as a function of energy. So you need a system where entropy (number of possible states) decreases with more energy. It's pretty rare to have such a system though. | ||