A Second Law for Higher Curvature Gravity

The Second Law of black hole thermodynamics is shown to hold for arbitrarily complicated theories of higher curvature gravity, so long as we allow only linearized perturbations to stationary black holes. Some ambiguities in Wald’s Noether charge method are resolved. The increasing quantity turns out to be the same as the holographic entanglement entropy calculated by Dong. It is suggested that only the linearization of the higher curvature Second Law is important, when consistently truncating a UV-complete quantum gravity theory.

Note:

10 pages. Honorable mention 2015 Gravity Research Foundation Essay; Appendix A, footnotes, some citations, and minor textual changes added later. v2 corrected typo in Eq. (14) for the linearized Dong entropy. To appear in IJMPD

Higher curvature
second law
black hole
horizon
Noether charge
curvature: high
black hole: entropy: calculated
black hole: thermodynamics
entropy: entanglement
perturbation: linear

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