Boundary effects on the thermal stability of a black hole at the centre of a conducting spherical shell

This paper reports calculations and analysis of the effects of a perfect conducting wall of a very large spherical shell on the stable thermodynamic equilibrium of a black hole sitting at the centre of the shell which is filled with Electromagnetic blackbody radiation. A parallel is drawn with the case where electromagnetic is replaced by scalar blackbody radiation with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions on the wall. It is found that the value of the shell radius above which only blackbody radiation remains in stable thermodynamic equilibrium can be considerably affected by vacuum polarization due to the presence of the wall.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Fracturing the optimal paths

Optimal paths play a fundamental role in numerous physical applications ranging from random polymers to brittle fracture, from the flow through porous media to information propagation. Here for the first time we explore the path that is activated once this optimal path fails and what happens when this new path also fails and so on, until the system is completely disconnected. In fact numerous applications can be found for this novel fracture problem. In the limit of strong disorder, our results show that all the cracks are located on a single self-similar connected line of fractal dimension $D_{b} \approx 1.22$. For weak disorder, the number of cracks spreads all over the entire network before global connectivity is lost. Strikingly, the disconnecting path (backbone) is, however, completely independent on the disorder.Comment: 4 pages,4 figure