2007/06/30 by Stephen D. H. Hsu, David Reeb · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Black brane #Black hole (networking) #Black hole complementarity #Black hole thermodynamics #Charged black hole #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Entropy (arrow of time) #Extremal black hole #Nonsingular black hole models #Physics #Quantum #Quantum mechanics #Semiclassical physics #Theoretical physics #White hole #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2007.09.021
published as Phys.Lett.B658:244-248,2008 · 5 pages, revtex. Final version to appear Physics Letters B
openalex publication_date 2007/10/01 · arxiv created 2007/10/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the microscopic origin of black hole entropy, in particular the gap between the maximum entropy of ordinary matter and that of black holes. Using curved space, we construct configurations with entropy greater than the area A of a black hole of equal mass. These configurations have pathological properties and we refer to them as monsters. When monsters are excluded we recover the entropy bound on ordinary matter S<A3/4. This bound implies that essentially all of the microstates of a semiclassical black hole are associated with the growth of a slightly smaller black hole which absorbs some additional energy. Our results suggest that the area entropy of black holes is the logarithm of the number of distinct ways in which one can form the black hole from ordinary matter and smaller black holes, but only after the exclusion of monster states.