1,496 research outputs found
Are there hyperentropic objects ?
By treating the Hawking radiation as a system in thermal equilibrium, Marolf
and R. Sorkin have argued that hyperentropic objects (those violating the
entropy bounds) would be emitted profusely with the radiation, thus opening a
loophole in black hole based arguments for such entropy bounds. We demonstrate,
on kinetic grounds, that hyperentropic objects could only be formed extremely
slowly, and so would be rare in the Hawking radiance, thus contributing
negligibly to its entropy. The arguments based on the generalized second law of
thermodynamics then rule out weakly self-gravitating hyperentropic objects and
a class of strongly self-gravitating ones.Comment: LaTeX, 4 page
How does the entropy/information bound work ?
According to the universal entropy bound, the entropy (and hence information
capacity) of a complete weakly self-gravitating physical system can be bounded
exclusively in terms of its circumscribing radius and total gravitating energy.
The bound's correctness is supported by explicit statistical calculations of
entropy, gedanken experiments involving the generalized second law, and
Bousso's covariant holographic bound. On the other hand, it is not always
obvious in a particular example how the system avoids having too many states
for given energy, and hence violating the bound. We analyze in detail several
purported counterexamples of this type (involving systems made of massive
particles, systems at low temperature, systems with high degeneracy of the
lowest excited states, systems with degenerate ground states, or involving a
particle spectrum with proliferation of nearly massless species), and exhibit
in each case the mechanism behind the bound's efficacy.Comment: LaTeX, 10 pages. Contribution to the special issue of Foundation of
Physics in honor of Asher Peres; C. Fuchs and A. van der Merwe, ed
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