Today I needed to refresh my memory on what the Boltzmann constant is in units
of wavenumbers per kelvin for reviewing a paper. I used DuckDuckGo to search
(it's 0.69 in case you wanted to know) and the automatic AI assistant on
DuckDuckGo helpfully provided me with the following information:
> The Boltzmann constant can be expressed in wavenumbers (cm⁻¹) by converting its
> value from joules per kelvin. The value of the Boltzmann constant is
> approximately 1.4388 × 10⁻⁴ cm⁻¹·K⁻¹.
That's not what I remembered, so I clicked for more information and got the following.
> Boltzmann Constant in Wavenumbers
> The Boltzmann constant is a fundamental physical constant that relates
> temperature to energy. It is commonly expressed in various units, including
> joules per kelvin (J/K) and electronvolts per kelvin (eV/K).
>
> Value of the Boltzmann Constant
> The value of the Boltzmann constant is:
> In Joules per Kelvin: kB=1.380649×10−23J/K
> In Electronvolts per Kelvin: kB=8.617333262×10−5eV/K
> Conversion to Wavenumbers
> To express the Boltzmann constant in wavenumbers (cm⁻¹), the following
> conversion can be used:
> 1 eV is approximately equal to 8065.5 cm⁻¹.
> Using this conversion factor, the Boltzmann constant in wavenumbers can be
> calculated as follows:
> In Wavenumbers:
> kB≈8.617333262×10−5eV/K×8065.5cm−1/eV≈6.947×10−4cm−1/K
It's OK up to the last step, but the multiplication is wrong by a factor of 1000
and the number is different to what it previously provided. The capitalisation
of units, names and symbols was flawless, however.
I guess it's fortunate there's very little numerical calculation in programming,
otherwise this might be a problem when using them for coding.