Showing papers by "Rong-Gen Cai published in 2004"

Gauss-Bonnet black holes in AdS spaces

Abstract: We study the thermodynamic properties and phase structures of topological black holes in Einstein theory with a Gauss-Bonnet term and a negative cosmological constant. The event horizon of these topological black holes can be a hypersurface with positive, zero, or negative constant curvature. When the horizon is a zero curvature hypersurface, the thermodynamic properties of black holes are completely the same as those of black holes without the Gauss-Bonnet term, although the two black hole solutions are quite different. When the horizon is a negative constant curvature hypersurface, the thermodynamic properties of the Gauss-Bonnet black holes are qualitatively similar to those of black holes without the Gauss-Bonnet term. When the event horizon is a hypersurface with positive constant curvature, we find that the thermodynamic properties and phase structures of black holes drastically depend on the spacetime dimension d and the coefficient of the Gauss-Bonnet term: when dgreater than or equal to6, the properties of black holes are also qualitatively similar to the case without the Gauss-Bonnet term, but when d=5, a new phase of locally stable small blacks holes occurs under a critical value of the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient, and beyond the critical value, the black holes are always thermodynamically stable. However, the locally stable small black hole is not globally preferred; instead a thermal anti-de Sitter space is globally preferred. We find that there is a minimal horizon radius, below which the Hawking-Page phase transition will not occur since for these black holes the thermal anti-de Sitter space is always globally preferred.

Holography, the cosmological constant and the upper limit of the number of e-foldings

Abstract: If the source of the current accelerating expansion of the universe is a positive cosmological constant, Banks and Fischler argued that there exists an upper limit of the total number of e-foldings of inflation. We further elaborate on the upper limit in the sense of viewing the cosmological horizon as the boundary of a cavity and of the holographic D-bound in a de Sitter space. Assuming a simple evolution model of inflation, we obtain an expression of the upper limit in terms of the cosmological constant, the energy density of the inflaton when the inflation starts, the energy density as the inflation ends and reheating temperature. We discuss how the upper limit is modified in the different evolution models of the universe. The holographic D-bound gives a higher upper limit than the entropy threshold in the cavity. For the most extreme case where the initial energy density of inflation is as high as the Planck energy, and the reheating temperature is as low as the energy scale of nucleosynthesis, the D-bound gives the upper limit as 146 and the entropy threshold as 122. For a reasonable assumption in the simplest cosmology, the holographic D-bound leads to a value of about 85, while the cavity model gives a value of around 65 for the upper limit, which is close to the value needed to solve the flatness problem and the horizon problem in the hot big bang cosmology.