Higher-dimensional violations of the holographic entropy bound

Abstract

The holographic bound, $S<=A/4{\ell^2_P}$, asserts that the entropy $S$ of a system is bounded from above by a quarter of the area $A$ of a circumscribing surface measured in Planck areas. This bound is widely regarded as part of the elusive fundamental theory of nature. In fact, the bound is known to be valid for generic weakly gravitating isolated systems in {\it three} spatial dimensions. Nevertheless, the entropy content of a physical system is expected to be an increasing function of the number of spatial dimensions (the more the dimensions, the more ways there are to split up a given amount of energy). Thus, one may expect the challenge to the holographic entropy bound to become more and more serious as the number of spatial dimensions increases. In this paper we explicitly show that thermal radiation in $D$ flat spatial dimensions with $D\gtrsim 10^2$ may indeed violate the holographic entropy bound.