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Signatures of an emergent gravity from black hole entropy

  • Essay Awarded by the Gravity Research Foundation
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Abstract

The existence of a thermodynamic description of horizons indicates that spacetime has a microstructure. While the “fundamental” degrees of freedom remain elusive, quantizing Einstein’s gravity provides some clues about their properties. A quantum AdS black hole possesses an equispaced mass spectrum, independent of Newton’s constant, G, when its horizon radius is large compared to the AdS length. Moreover, the black hole’s thermodynamics in this limit is inextricably connected with its thermodynamics in the opposite (Schwarzschild) limit by a duality of the Bose partition function. G, absent in the mass spectrum, reemerges in the thermodynamic description through the Schwarzschild limit, which should be viewed as a natural “ground state”. It seems that the Hawking-Page phase transition separates fundamental, “particle-like” degrees of freedom from effective, “geometric” ones.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RWC and Department of Physics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0011, USA

    Cenalo Vaz

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  1. Cenalo Vaz
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Correspondence to Cenalo Vaz.

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Fifth Award in the 2009 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.

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Vaz, C. Signatures of an emergent gravity from black hole entropy. Gen Relativ Gravit 41, 2307–2311 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-009-0848-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-009-0848-0

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