paper

Relativistic transformation of temperature revisited

arXiv:2606.00521 · doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2026.131860

Abstract

The relativistic transformation of temperature has long remained controversial, with the classical laws of Planck-Einstein, Ott-Eddington-Moller and Landsberg yielding conflicting results. We reexamine this issue from a relativistic thermodynamic and statistical perspective, starting from the energy-momentum tensor of an isotropic system and defining the effective temperature Teff as that inferred by a moving observer from the transformed energy density. Analyses of a photon gas, a relativistic ideal gas and an electron gas show that Teff consistently increases with velocity, supporting the Ott-Eddington interpretation while depending on the system's equation of state. These results indicate that temperature is not a Lorentz-invariant scalar but an observer-dependent quantity. A consistent relativistic description emerges when temperature is related to the inverse-temperature four-vector beta, linking operational and invariant viewpoints within a unified thermodynamic framework.

16 pages, 2 figures, to appear in PLA

References in corpus (6)