Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2013 May;87(5):052121. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.052121. Epub 2013 May 17.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Energy Transfer*
  • Gases / chemistry*
  • Models, Chemical*
  • Models, Molecular*
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Quantum Theory*
  • Thermodynamics*

Substances

  • Gases