From black hole entropy to energy-minimizing states in QFT
Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a coarse-grained entropy. The construction can be proven to exist classically but fails if the null energy condition is violated. Here we extend the coarse-graining construction to semiclassical gravity. Its validity is conjectural, but we are able to extract an interesting nongravitational limit. Our proposal implies Wall’s ant conjecture on the minimum energy of a completion of a quantum field theory state on a half-space. It further constrains the properties of the minimum energy state; for example, the minimum completion energy must be localized as a shock at the cut. We verify that the predicted properties hold in a recent explicit construction of Ceyhan and Faulkner, which proves our conjecture in the nongravitational limit.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231; SC0019380; PHY-1820912
- OSTI ID:
- 1597547
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1737600
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D., Journal Name: Physical Review. D. Vol. 101 Journal Issue: 4; ISSN 2470-0010
- Publisher:
- American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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