Abstract

The analogy between the laws of black hole mechanics and the laws of thermodynamics is made concrete through Hawking radiation. However, the derivation of Hawking radiation is independent of the theory of gravity. Therefore, 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. In recent years there has been renewed interest in extending this work to obtain a definition of black hole entropy that satisfies a second law of black hole mechanics in gravitational EFTs, as well as proving the zeroth law in such theories. In this talk I will present recent work (2401.13075, 2312.07659) that solves both of these problems in EFTs of gravity and a wide range of matter models.