Covariant kinetic theory of photons coupled to massive particles in curved spacetime

Long Cui; Yi-fan Cai; Xin Hao; Bin Wu

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arXiv · 2609.22837

Covariant kinetic theory of photons coupled to massive particles in curved spacetime

Long Cui·Yi-fan Cai·Xin Hao·Bin Wu

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Abstract

This paper develops the covariant Boltzmann equation governing the coupled evolution of photons and massive particles in general curved spacetimes. We construct the collision integrals for photon emission-absorption, Compton scattering, and scattering between massive particles, and show the conservation laws. Requiring the H-theorem to hold determines the relation between the absorption and emission transition rates, which reduces to the Einstein relation in the non-relativistic limit. At equilibrium the entropy production vanishes, yielding the detailed balance condition, from which we obtain the covariant thermodynamic relations of the photon gas. We illustrate these results with the thermal radiation from an accretion disk in Kerr spacetime, first in global equilibrium and then in a Keplerian disk in local thermodynamic equilibrium. We further extend the collision integrals to arbitrary multi-species processes involving both null and massive particles. The formulation treats non-equilibrium radiative processes in strong gravitational fields from first principles.

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Long Cui, Yi-fan Cai, Xin Hao, Bin Wu. 2026-09-19. Covariant kinetic theory of photons coupled to massive particles in curved spacetime. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22837

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