Statistical physics of a mesoscopic fermion system inside a rectangular box

An ideal Fermi gas of identical particles confined inside a rectangular box is considered. Using the grand‐canonical formalism and performing the summations over the one‐particle states numerically, the temperature dependence of the chemical potential, of the average energy and of the heat capacity are derived before the thermodynamic limit is taken. These mesoscopic quantities differ from the corresponding thermodynamic quantities only quantitatively but are qualitatively similar. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.