B Sánchez-Rey, G Chacón-Acosta, L Dagdug and D Cubero (pdf copy 366 Kb.)
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 J¨uttner 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 J¨uttner function.
Physical Review E 87 (2013) 052121
doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.052121