English

Dynamical Black Hole Entropy in Effective Field Theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-05-17 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In recent work, Hollands, Kov\'acs and Reall have built on previous work of Wall to provide a definition of dynamical black hole entropy for gravitational effective field theories (EFTs). This entropy satisfies a second law of black hole mechanics to quadratic order in perturbations around a stationary black hole. We determine the explicit form of this entropy for the EFT of 4d vacuum gravity including terms in the action with up to 6 derivatives. An open question concerns the gauge invariance of this definition of black hole entropy. We show that gauge invariance holds for the EFT of vacuum gravity with up to 6 derivatives but demonstrate that it can fail when 8 derivative terms are included. We determine an entropy for Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory by treating it as an EFT with vanishing 6 derivative terms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.09777,
  title  = {Dynamical Black Hole Entropy in Effective Field Theory},
  author = {Iain Davies and Harvey S. Reall},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.09777},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:43:07.588Z