Related papers: The Statistical Mechanics of Horizons and Black Ho…
Black holes are thermodynamic objects, but despite recent progress, the ultimate statistical mechanical origin of black hole temperature and entropy remains mysterious. Here I summarize an approach in which the entropy is viewed as arising…
We have known for more than thirty years that black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, radiating as black bodies with characteristic temperatures and entropies. This behavior is not only interesting in its own right; it could also,…
I review a new (and still tentative) approach to black hole thermodynamics that seeks to explain black hole entropy in terms of microscopic quantum gravitational boundary states induced on the black hole horizon.
Black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, and a central task of any quantum theory of gravity is to explain these thermal properties. A statistical mechanical description of black hole entropy once seemed remote, but today we suffer an…
We review recent progress in understanding certain aspects of the thermodynamics of black holes and other horizons. Our discussion centers on various ``entropy bounds'' which have been proposed in the literature and on the current…
We discuss the connection between different entropies introduced for black hole. It is demonstrated on the two-dimensional example that the (quantum) thermodynamical entropy of a hole coincides (including UV-finite terms) with its…
I present a viewpoint on black hole thermodynamics according to which the entropy: derives from horizon "degrees of freedom"; is finite because the deep structure of spacetime is discrete; is "objective" thanks to the distinguished coarse…
The thermodynamics of black holes is shown to be directly induced by their near-horizon conformal invariance. This behavior is exhibited using a scalar field as a probe of the black hole gravitational background, for a general class of…
A coarse-grained version of the effective action is used to study the thermodynamics of black holes, interpolating from largest to smallest masses. The physical parameter of the black hole are linked to the running couplings by…
To explain black hole thermodynamics in quantum gravity, one must introduce constraints to ensure that a black hole is actually present. I show that for a large class of black holes, such ``horizon constraints'' allow the use of conformal…
Although we have convincing evidence that a black hole bears an entropy proportional to its surface (horizon) area, the ``statistical mechanical'' explanation of this entropy remains unknown. Two basic questions in this connection are: what…
We present a statistical mechanical calculation of the thermodynamical properties of (non rotating) isolated horizons. The introduction of Planck scale allows for the definition of an universal horizon temperature (independent of the mass…
We discuss and compare different definitions of the entropy of a black hole. In particular we show that the thermodynamical entropy defined by the response of the free energy of a black hole to the change of temperature does not coincide…
The comparison of geometrical properties of black holes with classical thermodynamic variables reveals surprising parallels between the laws of black hole mechanics and the laws of thermodynamics. Since Hawking's discovery that black holes…
We review some recent advances in black hole thermodynamics, including statistical mechanical origins of black hole entropy and its leading order corrections, from the viewpoints of various quantum gravity theories. We then examine the…
We address a long-standing problem of describing the thermodynamics of a charged accelerating black hole. We derive a standard first law of black hole thermodynamics, with the usual identification of entropy proportional to the area of the…
This is an introductory, up-to-date review of the essentials of black hole thermodynamics. The main topics surveyed are: (i) the four laws of thermodynamics as applied to a black hole horizon, and the current status of their proofs; (ii)…
An investigation of black hole thermodynamics based on Tsallis statistical mechanics is explored through the study of the thermodynamics of a gas system located near the horizon of a black hole. In spite of the difficulty in exploring black…
We discuss the quantum mechanics and thermodynamics of the (2+1)-dimensional black hole, using both minisuperspace methods and exact results from Chern-Simons theory. In particular, we evaluate the first quantum correction to the black hole…
Modes of physical fields which are located inside a horizon and which cannot be observed by a distant observer are identified with dynamical degrees of freedom of a black hole. A new invariant statistical mechanical definition of a…