Thermodynamics at high energies

A new thermodynamics, applicable to cosmic ray showers and high-energy physics, is developed. Although all density expressions are unaltered, their global forms are modified due to the new dependence between the volume and the temperature. This occurs in bound systems where the number of particles, instead of being an increasing function of the temperature, is a decreasing one. That certain global expressions for the entropy turn out to be convex functions of the energy necessitates their reinterpretation as the reduction in entropy caused by the volume-temperature constraint. The continuous distribution for the production of hadrons with energies greater than a given amount is shown to correspond to the fact that discrete particle fluctuations follow Poisson's law.