# What is a simple intuitive way to see the relation between imaginary time (periodic) and temperature relation?

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I guess I never had a proper physical intuition on, for example, the "KMS condition". I have an undergraduate student who studies calculation of Hawking temperature using the Euclidean path integral technique, and shamefully his teacher is not able to give him a simple, intuitive argument for it. What would it be?

I should first say I understand there are formal relation between QFT and statistical mechanics as in well-known review like "Fulling & Ruijsenaars". But, when you try to explain this to students with less formal knowledge, it sometimes helps if we have an explicit examples. My motivation originally comes from "Srinivasan & Padmanabhan". In there, they says tunneling probability calculation using complex path (which is essentially a calculation of semi-classical kernel of propagator) can give a temperature interpretation because "In a system with a temperature $\beta^{-1}$ the absorption and emission probabilities are related by
P[emission] = $\exp(-\beta E)$P[absorption]. (2.22) "