Title: From black hole entropy to energy-minimizing states in QFT

Abstract

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.

Authors:

Bousso, Raphael; Chandrasekaran, Venkatesa; Shahbazi-Moghaddam, Arvin

Publication Date:

2020-02-05

Research Org.:

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); National Science Foundation (NSF)

OSTI Identifier:

1597547

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1737600

Grant/Contract Number:  

AC02-05CH11231; SC0019380; PHY-1820912

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Physical Review D

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Volume: 101 Journal Issue: 4; Journal ID: ISSN 2470-0010

Publisher:

American Physical Society (APS)

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; gauge-gravity dualities