Black Hole Entropy, Loop Gravity, and Polymer Physics

TL;DR

This paper links loop gravity's microscopic black hole entropy to a statistical mechanics model of polymer conformations, revealing new relations between black hole thermodynamics and polymer physics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel semiclassical description of black hole microstates as tessellated horizon shapes and maps entropy counting to polymer chain conformations.

Findings

Microstates correspond to tessellated horizon shapes

Entropy calculation reduces to polymer conformation counting

Reveals connections between black hole thermodynamics and polymer physics

Abstract

Loop Gravity provides a microscopic derivation of Black Hole entropy. In this paper, I show that the microstates counted admit a semiclassical description in terms of shapes of a tessellated horizon. The counting of microstates and the computation of the entropy can be done via a mapping to an equivalent statistical mechanical problem: the counting of conformations of a closed polymer chain. This correspondence suggests a number of intriguing relations between the thermodynamics of Black Holes and the physics of polymers.