The Laws of Black Hole Mechanics in Effective Field Theory

Iain Davies, DAMPT, University of Cambridge

If the conventional picture of black hole thermodynamics is correct then the laws of black hole mechanics should be robust against the inclusion of higher derivative effective field theory (EFT) corrections to the equations of motion. For the first law of black hole mechanics this was confirmed by the work of Wald in the early 1990s. Ever since then it has been an open problem to extend this work to obtain a definition of black hole entropy that satisfies a second law of black hole mechanics in gravitational EFTs. In this talk I will present recent work that solves this critical problem."