A Literature Review - Black Hole Thermodynamics

In the classical theory, black holes can only absorb and not emit particle. However, it is shown that quantum mechanical effects cause black holes to create and emit particles. Thus black holes can be seen as if they were hot bodies with temperature, in which we can now somehow relate the ordinary classical thermodynamics with black holes. The first indication of this relationship was derived by Hawking when he found that the surface area of black holes never decrease with time. This ‘area increase law’ bears a strong resemblance to the entropy concept in the second law of thermodynamic.

Bekenstein went further to propose that the suitable multiple of the area of event horizon of a black hole should be interpreted as its entropy, and that the generalized second law (GSL) must hold . The Generalized Second law states that the sum of the entropy of matter outside black hole plus a suitable multiple of the area of a black hole never decreases. About the same time a general mathematical proof was successfully developed by Bardeen, Carter and Hawking . They have arrived at a number of important results about the nature and properties of black holes in which can be summarized in the four laws of black hole mechanics. The results are direct mathematical analogs of the classical laws of thermodynamics.