Landauer’s principle as a criterion for thermodynamic consistency in generalized black hole entropies
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Under the assumption that black hole horizon area is quantized, each Hawking evaporation step, during which the black hole loses mass and transitions to a lower area level, is interpreted as the erasure of one bit of information. According to Landauer’s principle, erasing one bit requires an energy determined by the temperature of the surrounding environment. For black holes, we identify this temperature with the Hawking temperature, while the thermodynamic temperature derived from generalized entropy relations may differ from the Hawking temperature. This distinction allows Landauer’s principle to be used as an additional consistency criterion while keeping it distinct from the thermodynamic temperature obtained from the first law. In this paper, we employ Landauer’s principle to examine the consistency of various black hole entropy relations within this framework. For the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the energy emitted per step saturates the Landauer bound. We extend this analysis to a broad class of generalized entropy models, yielding three distinct outcomes. In the first category, Landauer’s principle imposes constraints on the Hawking temperature and, consequently, on the black hole mass. In the second, it restricts the free parameters of the entropy model. The third category, exemplified by Kaniadakis entropy, is incompatible with the Landauer condition within the fixed-background-temperature framework adopted here. For all compatible models, we derive the area quantization parameter and the corresponding area spectrum. While this parameter is constant for Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, it becomes level-number-dependent for the generalized entropies investigated in this paper. Nonetheless, the relative spacing between successive area levels vanishes in the classical limit. Our findings provide a connection between information theory and black hole thermodynamics within the adopted framework.
Source: Physics Letters B
Authors: Fatemeh Sadeghi, Ahmad Sheykhi
Institutions: Shiraz University, Isfahan University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Shiraz University
OpenAlex ID: W7171499017