title: Statistical mechanics of relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating systems.
abstract: We consider the statistical mechanics of a general relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system. The system consists of N particles coupled to lineal gravity and can be considered as a model of N relativistically interacting sheets of uniform mass. The partition function and one-particle distribution functions are computed to leading order in 1/c where c is the speed of light; as c --> infinity results for the nonrelativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system are recovered. We find that relativistic effects generally cause both position and momentum distribution functions to become more sharply peaked, and that the temperature of a relativistic gas is smaller than its nonrelativistic counterpart at the same fixed energy. We consider the large-N limit of our results and compare this to the nonrelativistic case.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. mann@avatar.uwaterloo.ca
authors.forename: R B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Mann
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chak