Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator

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 fu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2013-05, Vol.87 (5), p.052121-052121, Article 052121
Main Authors: Sánchez-Rey, Bernardo, Chacón-Acosta, Guillermo, Dagdug, Leonardo, Cubero, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer Simulation
Energy Transfer
Gases - chemistry
Models, Chemical
Models, Molecular
Models, Statistical
Quantum Theory
Thermodynamics
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1539-3755
1550-2376
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.87.052121