Selected Honorable Mention EssaysNo Access

Is there an upper bound on the size of a black hole?

Swastik Bhattacharya

Department of Physics, BITS Pilani Hyderabad, Hyderabad 500078, Telangana State, India

E-mail Address: swastik@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in

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and

S. Shankaranarayanan

Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai 400076, India

E-mail Address: shanki@phy.iitb.ac.in

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218271818470119Cited by:1 (Source: Crossref)

This article is part of the issue:

SPECIAL ISSUE — Selected Essays from the Annual Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation 2018 and Invited Papers; Editor: D. V. Ahluwalia

Abstract

According to the third law of Thermodynamics, it takes an infinite number of steps for any object, including black holes, to reach zero temperature. For any physical system, the process of cooling to absolute zero corresponds to erasing information or generating pure states. In contrast with the ordinary matter, the black hole temperature can be lowered only by adding matter–energy into it. However, it is impossible to remove the statistical fluctuations of the infalling matter–energy. The fluctuations lead to the fact that the black holes have a finite lower temperature and, hence, an upper bound on the horizon radius. We make an estimate of the upper bound for the horizon radius which is curiously comparable to Hubble horizon. We compare this bound with known results and discuss its implications.

This essay received an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.

Keywords:

PACS: 04.70.Dy, 05.40.−a

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