title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física Aplicada I, EPS, Universidad de Sevilla, Calle Virgen de África 7, 41011 Sevilla, Spain.
authors.forename: Bernardo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Rey
authors.forename: Guillermo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chacón-Acosta
authors.forename: Leonardo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dagdug
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cubero
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004735:Energy Transfer; D005740:Gases / Q000737:chemistry*; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011789:Quantum Theory; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D005740:Gases