How Does de Broglie Wavelength Affect Particle Behavior in Helium Gas?

mateomy
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The atoms in a gas can be treated as classical particles if their de Broglie wavelength is much smaller than the average separation between the particles. Compare the average de Broglie wavelength and the average separation between the atoms in a container of monatomic helium gas at 1.00 atm pressure and at room temperature (20 degrees C). At what temperature and pressure would you expect quantum effects to become important.I've calculated the de Broglie wavelength but I can't get the spacing between the atoms. Am I forgetting something from Chemistry? Can anyone give me a hint? I feel like I need a volume but clearly it isn't in the given info.

Thanks.
 
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Hello. My hint would be "ideal gas law". You don't need volume, but you do need volume per particle.
 
Awesome. I thought it had something to do with that. Thanks a lot.
 
I figured instead of putting this question into a new thread, I'd simply necro this one.

I'm currently stuck on this problem staring at a blank page. I understand that the De Broglie Wavelength formula is necessary here as well as the Ideal Gas Law, but I must be missing something. Can anyone give me a hint just to get me on track with this problem?

Thanks in advance.
 
To solve this, I first used the units to work out that a= m* a/m, i.e. t=z/λ. This would allow you to determine the time duration within an interval section by section and then add this to the previous ones to obtain the age of the respective layer. However, this would require a constant thickness per year for each interval. However, since this is most likely not the case, my next consideration was that the age must be the integral of a 1/λ(z) function, which I cannot model.
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