Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator
Statistical Mechanics
2013-09-19 v1
Abstract
We report fully relativistic molecular-dynamics simulations that verify the appearance of thermal equilibrium of a classical gas inside a uniformly accelerated container. The numerical experiments confirm that the local momentum distribution in this system is very well approximated by the J\"uttner function -- originally derived for a flat spacetime -- via the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect. Moreover, it is shown that when the acceleration or the container size is large enough, the global momentum distribution can be described by the so-called modified J\"uttner function, which was initially proposed as an alternative to the J\"uttner function.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1309.4615,
title = {Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator},
author = {Bernardo Sánchez-Rey and Guillermo Chacón-Acosta and Leonardo Dagdug and David Cubero},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.4615},
year = {2013}
}