English

TEMPERATURE AND RELATIVITY

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2009-10-28 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We investigate whether inertial thermometers moving in a thermal bath behave as being hotter or colder. This question is directly related to the classical controversy concerning how temperature transforms under Lorentz transformations. Rather than basing our arguments on thermodynamical hypotheses, we perform straightforward calculations in the context of relativistic quantum field theory. For this purpose we use Unruh-DeWitt detectors, since they have been shown to be reliable thermometers in semi-classical gravity. We believe that our discussion helps in definitely clarifying this issue.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.gr-qc/9505045,
  title  = {TEMPERATURE AND RELATIVITY},
  author = {Sandro S. Costa and George E. A. Matsas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/9505045},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

9 pages, 1 figure available upon request