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arxiv: hep-th/0012020 · v1 · submitted 2000-12-04 · ✦ hep-th · gr-qc

Thermodynamics of Near-Extreme Black Holes

classification ✦ hep-th gr-qc
keywords energystatesblackdegenerateexcitedgapsgroundhere
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The thermodynamics of nearly-extreme charged black holes depends upon the number of ground states at fixed large charge and upon the distribution of excited energy states. Here three possibilities are examined: (1) Ground state highly degenerate (as suggested by the large semiclassical Hawking entropy of an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole), excited states not. (2) All energy levels highly degenerate, with macroscopic energy gaps between them. (3) All states nondegenerate (or with low degeneracy), separated by exponentially tiny energy gaps. I suggest that in our world with broken supersymmetry, this last possibility seems most plausible. An experiment is proposed to distinguish between these possibilities, but it would take a time that is here calculated to be more than about 10^837 years.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    hep-th 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Near-extremal charged black holes make decoherence of charged particle superpositions vanish at late times via a spin-induced energy gap from quantum metric fluctuations.

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    Microscopic D-brane description of non-supersymmetric extremal black holes yields a unique ground state with non-zero energy, confirming absence of degeneracy.