Equipartition
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Equipartition usually refers to the fact that
in classical statistical mechanics each degree of freedom that appears quadratically in the energy (Hamiltonian) has an average value of , where is the thermal energy.
Thus, the thermal energy is shared equally ("equipartitioned") by all these degrees of freedom. This is a consequence of the equipartition theorem, which is very simple mathematically. As an immediate corollary, the translational energy of a molecule must equal Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \frac{3}{2}k_B T} , since translations are described by three degrees of freedom.