Are Black Hole and Cosmological Horizon Thermodynamics Necessarily Inequivalent?

Abstract

It has recently been argued that cosmological horizon thermodynamics and black hole thermodynamics are generically inequivalent in any consistent, UV complete theory of quantum gravity, where it was suggested that this could be falsified by the identification of a counterexample. This conjecture was motivated in part by noting that cosmological horizons do not incorporate many of the convenient features found in the black holes described by string theory. In this work, we consider as a toy model a universe with a single non-rotating black hole and a positive cosmological constant. We work in the Nariai limit where the mass of the black hole is taken to its maximum possible value, and where we also assert that the quantum field theory living on this background is strictly parity invariant. In the semi-classical regime where we neglect instability of the exact Nariai equilibrium under quantum fluctuations, we find that the observer cannot readily distinguish the physics in the neighborhood of the black hole horizon from the physics in the neighborhood of the cosmological horizon. This does not prove that the two are generically equivalent in any universe, though it does suggest that they cannot be entirely unrelated in general. We propose that any consistent theory of quantum gravity that aims to describe black holes in a universe with a positive cosmological constant should provide a related microscopic origin for the leading semiclassical cosmological entropy and black hole entropy in the neighborhood of the particular limit considered here.