Light Cone Black Holes

Abstract

When probed with conformally invariant matter fields, light cones in Minkowski spacetime satisfy thermodynamical relations which are the analog of those satisfied by stationary black holes coupled to standard matter fields. These properties stem from the fact that light cones are conformal Killing horizons stationary with respect to observers following the radial conformal Killing fields in flat spacetime. The four laws of light cone thermodynamics relate notions such as (conformal) temperature, (conformal) surface gravity, (conformal) energy and a conformally invariant notion related to area change. These quantities do not admit a direct physical interpretation in flat spacetime. However, they become the usual thermodynamical quantities when Minkowski is mapped, via a Weyl transformation, to a target spacetime where the conformal Killing field becomes a proper Killing field. In this paper we study the properties of such spacetimes. The simplest realisation turns out to be the Bertotti-Robinson solution, which is known to encode the near horizon geometry of near extremal and extremal charged black holes. The analogy between light cones in flat space and black hole horizons is therefore strengthened. The construction works in arbitrary dimensions; in two dimensions one recovers the Jackiv-Teitelboim black hole of dilaton gravity. Other interesting realisations are also presented.

arXiv comment23 pages, 7 figures; v2: typos corrected, matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Conformal quantum mechanics of causal diamonds
• Generating multi-partite entanglement from the quantum vacuum with a finite-lifetime mirror
• Entanglement Degradation in Causal Diamonds
• Vacuum thermal effects in flat space-time from conformal quantum mechanics
• Conformal quantum mechanics of causal diamonds: Time evolution, thermality, and instability via path integral functionals
• Path integral derivation of the thermofield double state in causal diamonds