The Hodograph Transform Between Thermodynamics and Relativity

TL;DR

This paper explores a geometric connection between thermodynamics and relativity via the hodograph transform, linking light rays in spacetime to thermodynamic phase space and deriving an effective temperature related to acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a hyperbolic hodograph transform in a contact-geometric framework that relates relativistic light rays to thermodynamic free energies, offering new insights into the Unruh effect.

Findings

Generating functions act as reduced free energies in a relativistic setting.

Derived an effective temperature proportional to acceleration, similar to the Unruh effect.

Established a geometric interpretation connecting light rays, thermodynamics, and relativity.

Abstract

In the contact-geometric approach to general relativity, the sky of an event - namely, the set of all incoming light rays - forms a Legendrian submanifold of the spherical cotangent bundle of a Cauchy hypersurface. When the hypersurface is chosen to be the Minkowski hyperboloid, a hyperbolic version of the hodograph transform identifies this bundle with a thermodynamic phase space. We consider a uniformly accelerating observer starting on the hyperboloid and study the evolution of its skies. We show that the associated generating functions, after a suitable rescaling, admit a natural interpretation as reduced free energies of equilibrium thermodynamic systems governed by the relativistic Doppler effect. From this data, we extract an effective temperature that is proportional to the acceleration, in agreement with the scaling of the Unruh effect, although the numerical constant differs from the Unruh value.