About Defining the Referent Thermal Scale Points

The absolute temperature T has a recognized physical meaning in equilibrium thermodynamics. The scale realized by the closely related Lagrange coefficient  usually figures as an auxiliary scale. In this article, the scale spanned by  is a proper intensive thermal quantity for equilibrium and, suitably generalized, for stationary non-equilibrium state description. The coefficient  measures a relative deviation of a system state from the state of uniform distribution function. The cause of deviation is coupling to environment, which is realized as a net energy transfer and which ceases in the  = 0 state. A canonical ensemble of two level atoms coupled to electromagnetic quasi-continuum is considered as an example. The proposed and the usual interpretations of  are applied to stationary states of the same system, in which case the notion of the generalized absolute temperature is introduced. The generalized absolute temperature is a measure of a deviation of a system state from a state of infinitely intense external influence.