Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 549
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3765-2

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

A quantal Tolman temperature

Department of Physics, Sogang University, Seoul, 121-742, South Korea

^* e-mail: wtkim@sogang.ac.kr

Received: 24 September 2015
Accepted: 27 October 2015
Published online: 24 November 2015

Abstract

The conventional Tolman temperature based on the assumption of the traceless condition of energy-momentum tensor for matter fields is infinite at the horizon if Hawking radiation is involved. However, we note that the temperature associated with Hawking radiation is of relevance to the trace anomaly, which means that the traceless condition should be released. So, a trace anomaly-induced Stefan-Boltzmann law is newly derived by employing the first law of thermodynamics and the property of the temperature independence of the trace anomaly. Then, the Tolman temperature is quantum-mechanically generalized according to the anomaly-induced Stefan-Boltzmann law. In an exactly soluble model, we show that the Tolman factor does not appear in the generalized Tolman temperature which is eventually finite everywhere, in particular, vanishing at the horizon. It turns out that the equivalence principle survives at the horizon with the help of the quantum principle, and some puzzles related to the Tolman temperature are also resolved.