arXiv · 1309.4615
Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator
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 Jüttner 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 Jüttner function, which was initially proposed as an alternative to the Jüttner function.
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Bernardo Sánchez-Rey, Guillermo Chacón-Acosta, Leonardo Dagdug, David Cubero. 2013-09-18. Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.87.052121
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