Correspondence between the Energy Equipartition Theorem in Classical Mechanics and Its Phase-Space Formulation in Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

In classical physics, there is a well-known theorem in which it is established that the energy per degree of freedom is the same. However, in quantum mechanics, due to the non-commutativity of some pairs of observables and the possibility of having non-Markovian dynamics, the energy is not equally distributed. We propose a correspondence between what is known as the classical energy equipartition theorem and its counterpart in the phase-space formulation in quantum mechanics based on the Wigner representation. Further, we show that in the high-temperature regime, the classical result is recovered.

Keywords

• energy equipartition theorem
• phase-space quantum mechanics
• statistical mechanics