Equipartition Theorem
States that energy is equally distributed among all available degrees of freedom of a system in thermal equilibrium, a cornerstone of kinetic theory.
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The statement of the theorem
Let be the Hamiltonian of a system with generalized coordinates in thermal equilibrium at temperature . Assume the contribution of the -th degree of freedom to the Hamiltonian is quadratic, . The canonical partition function is . The average energy associated with this degree of freedom is given by the expectation value: . Under the assumption that the system is ergodic and the Hamiltonian is separable into quadratic terms, the theorem states that for every such degree of freedom :
Source: Wikipedia