4 research outputs found
Extremal black holes, gravitational entropy and nonstationary metric fields
We show that extremal black holes have zero entropy by pointing out a simple
fact: they are time-independent throughout the spacetime and correspond to a
single classical microstate. We show that non-extremal black holes, including
the Schwarzschild black hole, contain a region hidden behind the event horizon
where all their Killing vectors are spacelike. This region is nonstationary and
the time labels a continuous set of classical microstates, the phase space
, where is a three-metric induced on a
spacelike hypersurface and is its momentum conjugate. We
determine explicitly the phase space in the interior region of the
Schwarzschild black hole. We identify its entropy as a measure of an outside
observer's ignorance of the classical microstates in the interior since the
parameter which labels the states lies anywhere between 0 and 2M. We
provide numerical evidence from recent simulations of gravitational collapse in
isotropic coordinates that the entropy of the Schwarzschild black hole stems
from the region inside and near the event horizon where the metric fields are
nonstationary; the rest of the spacetime, which is static, makes no
contribution. Extremal black holes have an event horizon but in contrast to
non-extremal black holes, their extended spacetimes do not possess a bifurcate
Killing horizon. This is consistent with the fact that extremal black holes are
time-independent and therefore have no distinct time-reverse.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Class. and Quant. Gravity. Based on
an essay selected for honorable mention in the 2010 gravity research
foundation essay competitio