The Canonical Ensemble Reloaded: The Complex-Stability of Euclidean quantum gravity for Black Holes in a Box

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability of Euclidean black hole solutions in a finite cavity, revealing how boundary conditions couple modes and affect stability, and generalizing the Wick rotation approach to complex eigenvalues.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to analyze mode stability in Euclidean black holes with boundary conditions, accounting for mode coupling and complex eigenvalues.

Findings

Large black holes are stable saddles.

Small black holes are unstable.

The eigenmode analysis aligns with thermodynamic expectations.

Abstract

We revisit the stability of black hole saddles for the Euclidean path integral describing the canonical partition function $Z(\beta)$ for gravity inside a spherical reflecting cavity. The boundary condition at the cavity wall couples the transverse-traceless (TT) and pure-trace modes that are traditionally used to describe fluctuations about Euclidean Schwarzschild black holes in infinite-volume asymptotically flat and asymototically AdS spacetimes. This coupling obstructs the familiar Gibbons-Hawking-Perry treatment of the conformal factor problem, as Wick rotation of the pure-trace modes would require that the TT modes be rotated as well. The coupling also leads to complex eigenvalues for the \L operator. We nevertheless find that the \L operator can be diagonalized in the space of coupled modes. This observation allows the eigenmodes to define a natural generalization of the pure-trace Wick-rotation recipe used in infinite volume, with the result that a mode with eigenvalue $\lambda$ is stable when ${\rm Re}\,\lambda > 0$. In any cavity, and with any cosmological constant $\Lambda \le 0$, we show this recipe to reproduce the expectation from black hole thermodynamics that large Euclidean black holes define stable saddles while the saddles defined by small Euclidean black holes are unstable.