December 21, 1998
We consider a possibility that the entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole has two different interpretations: The black hole entropy can be understood either as an outcome of a huge degeneracy in the mass eigenstates of the hole, or as a consequence of the fact that the interior region of black hole spacetime is separated from the exterior region by a horizon. In the latter case, no degeneracy in the mass eigenstates needs to be assumed. Our investigation is based on calculations performed with Lorentzian partition functions obtained for a whole maximally extended Schwarzschild spacetime, and for its right-hand-side exterior region. To check the correctness of our analysis we reproduce, in the leading order approximation, the Bekenstein--Hawking entropy of the Schwarzschild black hole.
Similar papers 1
October 18, 2004
It is commonplace, in the literature, to find that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy has been endowed with having an explicit statistical interpretation. In the following essay, we discuss why such a viewpoint warrants a certain degree of caution.
May 11, 2018
The notion of black-hole entropy was introduced by Jacob Bekenstein in 1972. During past 45 years this subject was in the center of interests of the modern theoretical physics. In this paper we briefly discuss "puzzles" of the black-hole physics, connected with their entropy. We also demonstrate that when the standard energy conditions are violated entropy associated with the event horizon can have quite unexpected behavior.
July 29, 2005
We discuss the most interesting approaches to derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula from a statistical theory.
March 1, 2017
Interior volume within the horizon of a black hole is a non-trivial concept which turns out to be very important to explain several issues in the context of quantum nature of black hole. Here we show that the entropy, contained by the {\it maximum} interior volume for massless modes, is proportional to the Bekenstein-Hawking expression. The proportionality constant is less than unity implying the horizon bears maximum entropy than that by the interior. The derivation is very ...
August 10, 1999
I argue that black hole entropy counts only those states of a black hole that can influence the outside, and attempt (with only partial success) to defend this claim against various objections, all but one coming from string theory. Implications for the nature of the Bekenstein bound are discussed, and in particular the case for a holographic principle is challenged. Finally, a generalization of black hole thermodynamics to "partial event horizons" in general spacetimes witho...
January 22, 2004
After recalling the definition of black holes, and reviewing their energetics and their classical thermodynamics, one expounds the conjecture of Bekenstein, attributing an entropy to black holes, and the calculation by Hawking of the semi-classical radiation spectrum of a black hole, involving a thermal (Planckian) factor. One then discusses the attempts to interpret the black-hole entropy as the logarithm of the number of quantum micro-states of a macroscopic black hole, wit...
July 23, 2018
We reconsider the interrelation between the Schwarzschild radius and mass of a spherical symmetric non-rotating and uncharged black hole. By applying the relativistic mass-energy equivalence, the area of the horizon is expressed independently of the Schwarzschild radius in terms of an occupation number operator corresponding to the underlying many-body system of the particles inside the black hole. Given the expectation value of the area, the von Neumann entropy based on the ...
June 2, 2008
We review aspects of the thermodynamics of black holes and in particular take into account the fact that the quantum entanglement between the degrees of freedom of a scalar field, traced inside the event horizon, can be the origin of black hole entropy. The main reason behind such a plausibility is that the well-known Bekenstein-Hawking entropy-area proportionality -- the so-called `area law' of black hole physics -- holds for entanglement entropy as well, provided the scalar...
October 23, 2019
In this paper, we successfully derive the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for Schwarzschild black holes in various dimensions by using a non-trivial phase space. It is appealing to notice that the thermodynamics of a Schwarzschild black hole actually behaves like that of a $1$-dimensional quantum mechanical system. Our result suggests that black hole should be viewed as a system with the equation of state $P=\rho$, and it also suggests that a holographic stage should exist in the ...
March 30, 1996
We argue that the statistical entropy relevant for the thermal interactions of a black hole with its surroundings is (the logarithm of) the number of quantum microstates of the hole which are distinguishable from the hole's exterior, and which correspond to a given hole's macroscopic configuration. We compute this number explicitly from first principles, for a Schwarzschild black hole, using nonperturbative quantum gravity in the loop representation. We obtain a black hole en...