Factors That Affect Specific Heat Capacity
For any given substance, the heat capacity of a body is directly proportional to the amount of substance it contains (measured in terms of mass or moles or volume). Doubling the amount of substance in a body doubles its heat capacity, etc.
However, when this effect has been corrected for, by dividing the heat capacity by the quantity of substance in a body, the resulting specific heat capacity is a function of the structure of the substance itself. In particular, it depends on the number of degrees of freedom that are available to the particles in the substance, each of which type of freedom allows substance particles to store energy. The kinetic energy of substance particles is the only one of the many possible degrees of freedom which manifests as temperature change, and thus the larger the number of degrees of freedom available to the particles of a substance other than kinetic energy, the larger will be the specific heat capacity for the substance.
In addition, quantum effects require that whenever energy be stored in any mechanism associated with a bound system which confers a degree of freedom, it must be stored in certain minimal-sized deposits (quanta) of energy, or else not stored at all. Such effects limit the full ability of some degrees of freedom to store energy when their lowest energy storage quantum amount is not easily supplied at the average energy of particles at a given temperature. In general, for this reason, specific heat capacities tend to fall at lower temperatures where the average thermal energy available to each particle degree of freedom is smaller, and thermal energy storage begins to be limited by these quantum effects. Due to this process, as temperature falls toward absolute zero, so also does heat capacity.
Read more about this topic: Heat Capacity, Theory of Heat Capacity
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