Limits on the Statistical Description of Charged de Sitter Black Holes

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Main Authors: Aalsma, Lars, Lin, Puxin, van der Schaar, Jan Pieter, Shiu, Gary, Sybesma, Watse
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Aalsma, Lars
Lin, Puxin
van der Schaar, Jan Pieter
Shiu, Gary
Sybesma, Watse
author_facet Aalsma, Lars
Lin, Puxin
van der Schaar, Jan Pieter
Shiu, Gary
Sybesma, Watse
contents The thermodynamics of de Sitter black holes is complicated by the presence of two horizons and the absence of a globally defined timelike Killing vector. The standard choice of the Gibbons-Hawking Killing vector is at odds with the interpretation of the surface gravity as an acceleration measured by a physical observer at rest. Focusing on four-dimensional Reissner-Nordström de Sitter black holes we show that this issue can be resolved by adopting a normalization originally proposed by Bousso and Hawking, which defines thermodynamic quantities relative to the unique freely-falling observer at a fixed radial coordinate. Within this framework, we derive new first laws for the black hole and cosmological horizon and re-examine the black hole's heat capacity. We find that the heat capacity remains finite in the near-extremal Nariai limit, thus averting a breakdown of the semi-classical thermodynamic description. However, the heat capacity does vanish in the cold limit, as expected, and for Nariai black holes in the ultracold limit, indicating that fundamental limitations on the statistical description persist in these regimes. We discuss the implications of our results for log-$T$ corrections to near-extremal de Sitter black holes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03867
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Limits on the Statistical Description of Charged de Sitter Black Holes
Aalsma, Lars
Lin, Puxin
van der Schaar, Jan Pieter
Shiu, Gary
Sybesma, Watse
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
The thermodynamics of de Sitter black holes is complicated by the presence of two horizons and the absence of a globally defined timelike Killing vector. The standard choice of the Gibbons-Hawking Killing vector is at odds with the interpretation of the surface gravity as an acceleration measured by a physical observer at rest. Focusing on four-dimensional Reissner-Nordström de Sitter black holes we show that this issue can be resolved by adopting a normalization originally proposed by Bousso and Hawking, which defines thermodynamic quantities relative to the unique freely-falling observer at a fixed radial coordinate. Within this framework, we derive new first laws for the black hole and cosmological horizon and re-examine the black hole's heat capacity. We find that the heat capacity remains finite in the near-extremal Nariai limit, thus averting a breakdown of the semi-classical thermodynamic description. However, the heat capacity does vanish in the cold limit, as expected, and for Nariai black holes in the ultracold limit, indicating that fundamental limitations on the statistical description persist in these regimes. We discuss the implications of our results for log-$T$ corrections to near-extremal de Sitter black holes.
title Limits on the Statistical Description of Charged de Sitter Black Holes
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03867