Near-Extreme Black Holes and the Universal Relaxation Bound

Abstract

A fundamental bound on the relaxation time \tau of a perturbed thermodynamical system has recently been derived, \tau \geq \hbar/\pi T, where $T$ is the system's temperature. We demonstrate analytically that black holes saturate this bound in the extremal limit and for large values of the azimuthal number m of the perturbation field.