Signatures of an Emergent Gravity from Black Hole Entropy

Abstract

The existence of a thermodynamic description of horizons indicates that spacetime has a microstructure. While the "fundamental" degrees of freedom remain elusive, quantizing Einstein's gravity provides some clues about their properties. A quantum AdS black hole possesses an equispaced mass spectrum, independent of Newton's constant, $G$, when its horizon radius is large compared to the AdS length. Moreover, the black hole's thermodynamics in this limit is inextricably connected with its thermodynamics in the opposite (Schwarzschild) limit by a duality of the Bose partition function. $G$, absent in the mass spectrum, reemerges in the thermodynamic description through the Schwarzschild limit, which should be viewed as a natural "ground state". It seems that the Hawking-Page phase transition separates fundamental, "particle-like" degrees of freedom from effective, "geometric" ones.

Fifth prize at the 2009 Gravity Research Foundation Awards for Essays on Gravitation. 5 pages, no figures

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