# Black hole entropy
Black holes have entropy. The entropy of a black hole is given by the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, $S=\frac{A c^3}{4 G \hbar},$which, very interestingly, is proportional to the *area* of the horizon, $A$. This is very surprising because entropy is an extensive quantity and is proportional to the *volume* for a box a gas. This fact turns out to be a manifestation of the holographic principle, i.e. the information content of the black hole is somehow encoded in some lower-dimensional space.
In [[0554 Einstein gravity|General Relativity]], the area of the black hole can only [[0005 Black hole second law|increase]] in time, and a change in the area is related to other quantities such as mass, angular momentum and charge. These can all be summarised as [[0127 Black hole thermodynamics|laws of black hole thermodynamics]], and they look just the same as ordinary thermodynamic laws. It turned out, interestingly, that black holes are in fact thermodynamical objects just like everything else. This realisation was a result of [[0304 Hawking radiation|Hawking's calculation]], which established that black holes radiate with a spectrum dependent on the temperature just like any ordinary object with a temperature.
## Refs
- classical BH entropy
- [[0005 Black hole second law]]
- with matter
- [[0082 Generalised second law]]
- [[0145 Generalised area|holographic entanglement entropy functional]]
- arbitrary region
- [[0044 Extended phase space|Extended phase space]]
- approach of Casini et al
- [[0127 Black hole thermodynamics]]
## Arbitrary region
- [[2012#Bianchi, Myers]]
- holographic holes
- [[BalasubramanianCzechChowdhuryDeBoer2013]][](https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0856)
- entropy of a spherical hole is $A/4$
- [[BalasubramanianChowdhuryCzechDeBoerHeller2013]][](https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4204)
- embedding in AAdS
- in higher dimensions
- [[MyersRaoSugishita2014]][](https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3416)
## Methods
- Euclidean methods
- has $U(1)$ symmetry
- solutions changes while keeping interior smooth
- uses a background metric
- Euclidean method origin: [[GibbonsHawking1977]]
- 4 method listed in [[1995#Iyer, Wald]]
- Wald method
- independent of boundary condition
- shown recently by R. B. Mann
- have [[0018 JKM ambiguity]]
- field redefinition
- [[1993#Jacobson, Kang, Myers]]
- Wall method for time-dependent black holes
- [[2015#Wall (Essay)]] for f(Riem)
- extended phase space method
- for Einstein [[2016#Donnelly, Freidel]]
- higher derivative [[2017#Speranza]]
- Kerr/CFT
- [[2009#Azeyanagi, Compere, Ogawa, Tachikawa, Terashima]] obtains Wald entropy by choosing boundary term
- Dirichlet flux
- not done for general higher derivative
- [[2020#Chandrasekaran, Speranza]]
- boundary Noether current approach
- [[MajhiPadmanabhan2012]]
- [[Majhi2012]]
- t'Hooft S-matrix approach
- [[THooft2000]][](https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0003004)
- Bianchi's local approach
- [[Bianchi2012]][](https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0522)
- [[0357 Imaginary action]]
- [[2013#Neiman]]
## BC dependence
- should not depend on BC (see e.g. [[2020#Khodabakhshi, Shirzad, Shojai, Mann]])
## Early development
- [[FloydPenrose1971]]: Area always increase in Penrose process [[1969#Penrose]], so maybe this is more general.
- [[Hawking1971]]: BH entropy does not decrease in any process.
- [[Bekenstein1973]]: introduces Area = entropy.
- [[CallanWilczek1994]]: develop a straightforward Hamiltonian approach to geometric entropy and a less direct Euclidean (aka. heat kernel) method
- show that geometric entropy is the first quantum correction to a thermodynamic entropy which reduces to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in the black hole context
- seems to introduce the replica trick
## From string theory
- [[2023#Dabholkar, Moitra (Jun)]] and refs therein