We consider the statistical mechanics of a general relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system. The system consists of N-particles coupled to lineal gravity and can be considered as a model of N relativistically interacting sheets of uniform mass. The partition function and one-particle distitrubion functions are computed to leading order in 1/c where c is the speed of light; as c→∞
Nearby in the stack
results for the non-relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system are recovered. We find that relativistic effects generally cause both position and momentum distribution functions to become more sharply peaked, and that the temperature of a relativistic gas is smaller than its non-relativistic counterpart at the same fixed energy. We consider the large-N limit of our results and compare this to the non-relativistic case.