Related papers: Black Hole Entropy: a spacetime foam approach
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…
Spacetime is composed of a fluctuating arrangement of bubbles or loops called spacetime foam, or quantum foam. We use the holographic principle to deduce its structure, and show that the result is consistent with gedanken experiments…
The quasi-local notion of an isolated horizon is employed to study the entropy of black holes without any particular symmetry in loop quantum gravity. The idea of characterizing the shape of a horizon by a sequence of local areas is…
An attempt is made to describe the `thermodynamics' of semiclassical spacetime without specifying the detailed `molecular structure' of the quantum spacetime, using the known properties of blackholes. I give detailed arguments, essentially…
Due to quantum fluctuations, spacetime is foamy on small scales. The degree of foaminess is found to be consistent with holography, a principle prefigured in the physics of black hole entropy. It has bearing on the ultimate accuracies of…
In gravitational thermodynamics, the entropy of a black hole with distinct surface gravities can be evaluated in a microcanonical ensemble. At the $WKB$ level, the entropy becomes the negative of the Euclidean action of the constrained…
In gravitational thermodynamics, the origin of a black hole's entropy is the topology of its instanton or constrained instanton. We prove that the entropy of an arbitrary nonrotating black hole is one quarter the sum of the products of the…
Adopting the thin-layer improved brick-wall method, we investigate the thermodynamics of a black hole embedded in a spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe. We calculate the temperature and the entropy at every apparent horizon…
Black hole thermodynamics is the area of study that seeks to reconcile the laws of thermodynamics with the existence of black hole event horizons. Here we calculate the entropy corresponding to the interior of a Schwarzschild black hole for…
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…
Black holes monopolize nowadays the center stage of fundamental physics. Yet, they are poorly understood objects. Notwithstanding, from their generic properties, one can infer important clues to what a fundamental theory, a theory that…
To derive black hole thermodynamics in any quantum theory of gravity, one must introduce constraints that ensure that a black hole is actually present. For a large class of black holes, the imposition of such ``horizon constraints'' allows…
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)…
Black holes exist all over our Universe, possessing a very wide range of masses. At the moment, they serve as a probe to test general relativity at astrophysical scales, but in the future they may also give us information about gravity at…
Black holes have the peculiar and intriguing property of having an event horizon, a one-way membrane causally separating their internal region from the rest of the Universe. Today astrophysical observations provide some evidence for the…
Ultraviolet regime in quantum theory with horizons, contrary to ordinary theory, depends on the temperature of the system due to additional surface divergences in the effective action. We evaluate their general one-loop structure paying…
One of the remarkable features of black holes is that they possess a thermodynamic description, even though they do not appear to be statistical systems. We use self-gravitating magnetic monopole solutions as tools for understanding the…
The impact of the leading quantum gravity effects on the dynamics of the Hawking evaporation process of a black hole is investigated. Its spacetime structure is described by a renormalization group improved Vaidya metric. Its event 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…
Although we know that black holes are characterized by a temperature and an entropy, we do not yet have a satisfactory microscopic ``statistical mechanical'' explanation for black hole thermodynamics. I describe a new approach that…