English

Recommended Second Virial Coefficients for Nitrogen and Oxygen

Chemical Physics 2026-07-27 v1

Abstract

We provide recommended values for the second virial coefficient, B(T)B(T), and its uncertainty, for molecular nitrogen and oxygen. The temperature range covered is 20300020-3000 K for nitrogen and 20200020-2000 K for oxygen. The recommendations are based on tuning previously published state-of-the-art ab initio pair potentials so that the B(T)B(T) calculated from the potentials match selected high-accuracy experimental data; for nitrogen the tuning utilizes values of BB derived from literature density data with greatly reduced uncertainty by analyzing the data with the aid of ab initio calculated higher virial coefficients. Quantum effects on BB are fully included with the path-integral Monte Carlo method. The resulting B(T)B(T) have uncertainties similar to those of the best experimental data, but cover a much wider temperature range.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.24634,
  title  = {Recommended Second Virial Coefficients for Nitrogen and Oxygen},
  author = {Robert Hellmann and Giovanni Garberoglio and Allan H. Harvey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.24634},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 3 figures