On the Thermodynamic Temperature of a General Distribution

Krishna R. Narayanan, Arun R. Srinivasa

Published 2007-11-09, updated 2007-11-10Version 2

The concept of temperature is one of the key ideas in describing the thermodynamical properties of a physical system. In classical statistical mechanics of ideal gases, the notion of temperature can be described in two different ways, the kinetic temperature and the thermodynamic temperature. For the Boltzmann distribution, the two notions lead to the same result. However, for a general probability density function, while the kinetic temperature has been commonly used, there appears to be no corresponding general definition of thermodynamic temperature. In this paper, we propose such a definition and show that it is connected to the Fisher information associated with the distribution of the momenta.