Speaker: Tiago Fernandes (CENTRA)
Title: Black holes in the grand canonical ensemble
Abstract:
From the successful works of Bekenstein and Hawking, it is known that black holes are thermodynamic objects. In particular, black holes emit particles as a black body at the Hawking temperature, and have a precise entropy, the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. The nature of the entropy of a black hole is still an open problem, a possible explanation may lie on a theory of quantum gravity. In this seminar, I will talk about the construction of the canonical and grand canonical ensembles for black hole spacetimes using the path integral approach to quantum gravity. Such ensembles determine the thermodynamics of a black hole from a semiclassical approximation of the quantum theory. The seminar is planned as follows: (i) I will summarize previous works, from Gibbons and Hawking, to York and André and Lemos; (ii) I will then describe the results of my current work on the grand canonical ensemble of d-dimensional Reissner-Nordström black holes in a cavity and compare them to the case of a charged conducting sphere in flat d-dimensional spacetime in a cavity.
Room: Sala de Reuniões e Seminários (2-8.3) (2nd Floor of Physics Building)