Local Temperature in Curved Spacetime

Abstract

A physically meaningful local concept of temperature is introduced in quantum field theory on curved spacetime and applied to the example of a massless field on de Sitter space. It turns out in this model that the equilibrium (Gibbs) states which can be prepared by a geodesic observer have in general a varying temperature distribution in the neighborhood of the geodesic and may not even allow for a consistent thermal interpretation close to the horizon. This result, which can be traced back to the Unruh effect, illustrates the failure of a global notion of temperature in curved spacetime and reveals the need for a local concept, as presented here.

9 pages, no figures; minor changes in the exposition; version as to appear in CQG

References in corpus (1)

• Local Thermal Equilibrium States and Unruh Detectors in Quantum Field Theory

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