Abstract
Understanding thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the fully general relativistic context is an open problem. I give tentative definitions of equilibrium state, mean values, mean geometry, entropy and temperature, which reduce to the conventional ones in the nonrelativistic limit but remain valid for a general covariant theory. The formalism extends to quantum theory. The construction builds on the idea of thermal time, on a notion of locality for this time, and on the distinction between global and local temperature. The last is the temperature measured by a local thermometer and is given by , with the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, proper time and the equilibrium thermal time.
- Received 21 November 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.87.084055
© 2013 American Physical Society