Thermal equilibrium in Einsteins elevator


Abstract in English

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 Juttner 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 Juttner function, which was initially proposed as an alternative to the Juttner function.

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