2009/02/28 by Jörn Dunkel, Peter Hänggi, Stefan Hilbert · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Differential Geometry Research #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #astro-ph.HE #cond-mat.stat-mech #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nphys1395
published as Nature Physics 5:741, 2009 · typos in Eqs. (12) and (14) corrected, minor additions in the text
arxiv created 2009/03/25 · openalex publication_date 2009/09/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The unification of relativity and thermodynamics has been a subject of considerable debate over the last 100 years. The reasons for this are twofold: (i) Thermodynamic variables are nonlocal quantities and, thus, single out a preferred class of hyperplanes in spacetime. (ii) There exist different, seemingly equally plausible ways of defining heat and work in relativistic systems. These ambiguities led, for example, to various proposals for the Lorentz transformation law of temperature. Traditional 'isochronous' formulations of relativistic thermodynamics are neither theoretically satisfactory nor experimentally feasible. Here, we demonstrate how these deficiencies can be resolved by defining thermodynamic quantities with respect to the backward-lightcone of an observation event. This approach yields novel, testable predictions and allows for a straightforward-extension of thermodynamics to General Relativity. Our theoretical considerations are illustrated through three-dimensional relativistic many-body simulations.