The mechanical first law of black hole spacetimes with a cosmological constant and its application to the Schwarzschild–de Sitter spacetime

TLDR: In this paper, the authors extended the Iyer-Wald formalism to the case of two-horizon spacetimes and derived the MFL of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) spacetime.

Abstract: The mechanical first law (MFL) of black hole spacetimes is a geometrical relation which relates variations of the mass parameter and horizon area. While it is well known that the MFL of an asymptotic flat black hole is equivalent to its thermodynamical first law, however we do not know the detail of the MFL of black hole spacetimes with a cosmological constant which possess a black hole and cosmological event horizons. This paper aims to formulate an MFL of the two-horizon spacetimes. For this purpose, we try to include the effects of two horizons in the MFL. To do so, we make use of the Iyer–Wald formalism and extend it to regard the mass parameter and the cosmological constant as two independent variables which make it possible to treat the two horizons on the same footing. Our extended Iyer–Wald formalism preserves the existence of the conserved Noether current and its associated Noether charge, and gives an abstract form of the MFL of black hole spacetimes with a cosmological constant. Then, as a representative application of this formalism, we derive the MFL of the Schwarzschild–de Sitter (SdS) spacetime. Our MFL of the SdS spacetime relates the variations of three quantities: the mass parameter, the total area of the two horizons and the volume enclosed by the two horizons. If our MFL is regarded as a thermodynamical first law of the SdS spacetime, it offers a thermodynamically consistent description of the SdS black hole evaporation process: the mass decreases while the volume and the entropy increase. In our suggestion, a generalized second law is not needed to ensure the second law of SdS thermodynamics for its evaporation process.