English

Classical thermodynamics of gravitational collapse

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study numerically gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric instanton particle in five dimensions. We show that the late stages of the process are characterized by a nearly constant ``free energy'', the value of which matches (within numerical uncertainties) the value obtained from standard black-hole thermodynamics. This suggests a purely classical interpretation of the free energy of a black hole.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.3662,
  title  = {Classical thermodynamics of gravitational collapse},
  author = {Z. Gecse and S. Khlebnikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.3662},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

11 pages, 5 figures; v3: minor changes; published in Phys. Rev. D

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:05:53.288Z