Concept

Gibbs measure

Summary
In mathematics, the Gibbs measure, named after Josiah Willard Gibbs, is a probability measure frequently seen in many problems of probability theory and statistical mechanics. It is a generalization of the canonical ensemble to infinite systems. The canonical ensemble gives the probability of the system X being in state x (equivalently, of the random variable X having value x) as :P(X=x) = \frac{1}{Z(\beta)} \exp ( - \beta E(x)). Here, E is a function from the space of states to the real numbers; in physics applications, E(x) is interpreted as the energy of the configuration x. The parameter β is a free parameter; in physics, it is the inverse temperature. The normalizing constant Z(β) is the partition function. However, in infinite systems, the total energy is no longer a finite number and cannot be used in the traditional construction of the probability distribution of a canonical ensemble. Traditional approaches in statistical physics studied the limit o
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