Dirty black holes: Entropy as a surface term

Abstract

It is by now clear that the naive rule for the entropy of a black hole, {entropy} = 1/4 {area of event horizon}, is violated in many interesting cases. Indeed, several authors have recently conjectured that in general the entropy of a dirty black hole might be given purely in terms of some surface integral over the event horizon of that black hole. A formal proof of this conjecture, using Lorentzian signature techniques, has recently been provided by Wald. This note performs two functions. Firstly, a rather different proof of this result is presented --- a proof based on Euclidean signature techniques. The total entropy is S = 1/4 {k A_H / l_P^2} + \int_H {S} \sqrt{g} d^2x. The integration runs over a spacelike cross-section of the event horizon H. The surface entropy density, {S}, is related to the behaviour of the matter Lagrangian under time dilations. Secondly, I shall consider the specific case of Einstein-Hilbert gravity coupled to an effective Lagrangian that is an arbitrary function of the Riemann tensor (though not of its derivatives). In this case a more explicit result is obtained S = 1/4 {k A_H / l_P^2} + 4 pi {k/hbar} \int_H {partial L / partial R_{μνλρ}} g^\perp_{μλ} g^\perp_{νρ} \sqrt{g} d^2x . The symbol $g^\perp_{μν}$ denotes the projection onto the two-dimensional subspace orthogonal to the event horizon.