Black Hole Entropy, Loop Gravity, and Polymer Physics

Abstract

Loop Gravity provides a microscopic derivation of Black Hole entropy. In this paper, I show that the microstates counted admit a semiclassical description in terms of shapes of a tessellated horizon. The counting of microstates and the computation of the entropy can be done via a mapping to an equivalent statistical mechanical problem: the counting of conformations of a closed polymer chain. This correspondence suggests a number of intriguing relations between the thermodynamics of Black Holes and the physics of polymers.

13 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• A new spinfoam vertex for quantum gravity
• Counting black hole microscopic states in loop quantum gravity
• The combinatorics of the SU(2) black hole entropy in loop quantum gravity
• Entropy calculation for a toy black hole