English

Dynamical entropy of charged black objects

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-03-30 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We develop a general framework for electromagnetic potential-charge contributions to the first law of black hole mechanics, applicable to dynamical first-order perturbations of stationary black objects with possibly non-compact bifurcate Killing horizons. Working in the covariant phase space formalism, we derive both comparison and physical process versions of the first law. We consider generic diffeomorphism-invariant theories of gravity in DD spacetime dimensions, containing non-minimally coupled abelian pp-form gauge fields. The pullback of the gauge field to the horizon is allowed to diverge while its field strength remains smooth, yielding gauge-invariant electric potential-charge pairs in the first law. We further extend the construction to include magnetic charges by developing a bundle-covariant, gauge-invariant prescription that fixes the Jacobson-Kang-Myers ambiguity in the improved Noether charge. Electric and magnetic charges are, respectively, associated with non-trivial (Dp1)(D - p - 1)- and (p+1)(p + 1)-cycles of the horizon cross-section, whose homology classes determine the number of independent potential-charge pairs through the Betti numbers bDp1b_{D - p - 1} and bp+1b_{p + 1}. Further, the dynamical gravitational entropy entering the first law is identified with the gauge-invariant part of the improved Noether charge, giving a gauge-invariant extension of the recent proposal by Hollands, Wald and Zhang. We illustrate our framework with dyonic AdS black holes, dipole black rings, and charged black branes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.20747,
  title  = {Dynamical entropy of charged black objects},
  author = {Manus R. Visser and Zihan Yan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20747},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

54+9 pages, 6 figures; v2: added brief clarifications, JHEP version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:02:31.404Z