The Rotating Quantum Thermal Distribution

TL;DR

This paper investigates the issues with rotating quantum thermal distributions in flat spacetime, proposing a cylindrical mirror to resolve global pathologies and analyzing the resulting energy-momentum tensor.

Contribution

It introduces a condition on the mirror's radius to eliminate global pathologies in rotating quantum thermal states and provides numerical analysis of the energy-momentum tensor.

Findings

A cylindrical mirror with radius smaller than the speed-of-light cylinder removes global pathologies.

The energy-momentum tensor matches a rotating thermal bath with finite corrections.

Casimir divergences appear at the mirror surface.

Abstract

We show that the rigidly rotating quantum thermal distribution on flat space-time suffers from a global pathology which can be cured by introducing a cylindrical mirror if and only if it has a radius smaller than that of the speed-of-light cylinder. When this condition is met, we demonstrate numerically that the renormalized expectation value of the energy-momentum stress tensor corresponds to a rigidly rotating thermal bath up to a finite correction except on the mirror where there are the usual Casimir divergences.