Seminar - Black Hole Chemistry

School of Engineering and Computer Science Seminar

Speaker: Robert Mann (U Waterloo; Canada)
Time: Tuesday 3rd February 2015 at 11:10 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: Cotton Club, Cotton 350

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Abstract

Black Holes are amongst the strangest objects in the universe. They form from the collapse of matter into an object whose gravitational pull is so strong, nothing can escape from them. Yet a black hole also radiates heat like a black body, with a temperature equal to its surface gravity, an entropy equal to its area, and an energy equal to its mass. I will describe recent work that is transforming our perspective on black hole thermodynamics, one that indicates black holes behave more like chemical systems. When vacuum energy is taken into account, mass becomes chemical enthalpy, the notion of a thermodynamic volume appears, and black holes exhibit a broad range of chemical phenomena, including liquid/gas phase transitions similar to a Van der Waals fluid, triple points similar to that of water, and re-entrant phase transitions that appear in gels. I will outline the foundations of this âblack hole chemistryâ and highlight both the new phenomena that have been recently discovered and their implications for our understanding of gravitational physics.

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