The set of Gibbs measures on a system is always convex, so there is either a unique Gibbs measure (in which case the system is said to be " ergodic "), or there are infinitely many (and the system is called "nonergodic"). In the nonergodic case, the Gibbs measures can be expressed as the set of convex combinations of a much smaller number of special Gibbs measures known as "pure states" (not to be confused with the related but distinct notion of pure states in quantum mechanics). In physical applications, the Hamiltonian (the energy function) usually has some sense of locality, and the pure states have the cluster decomposition property that "far-separated subsystems" are independent. In practice, physically realistic systems are found in one of these pure states.