Thermal equilibrium in Einstein's elevator.

We report fully relativistic molecular-dynamics simulations that verify the appearance of thermal equilibrium of a classical gas inside a uniformly accelerated container. The numerical experiments confirm that the local momentum distribution in this system is very well approximated by the Jüttner function-originally derived for a flat spacetime-via the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect. Moreover, it is shown that when the acceleration or the container size is large enough, the global momentum distribution can be described by the so-called modified Jüttner function, which was initially proposed as an alternative to the Jüttner function.