Microcanonical Phase Space and Entropy in Curved Spacetime

We discuss the structure of microcanonical ensembles in inertial and non-inertial frames attached to a confined system of positive energy particles in curved spacetime. Under certain physically reasonable assumptions that ensure the existence of such ensembles, we derive two generic characteristics of the leading curvature corrections: (1) they are characterized by Ricci and Einstein tensors, and (2) their contribution is proportional to the boundary area of the system. We also obtain exact analytical results for microcanonical ensembles in de Sitter spacetime, which reproduce the perturbative results in the limit $\Lambda \to 0$, but have interesting limits when the size of the system is comparable to ${\Lambda}^{-1/2}$. We give a general argument to highlight two distinct sources of divergences in the phase space volume, coming from redshift and spatial geometry, and illustrate this by comparing and contrasting the results for (i) geodesic box in de Sitter, (ii) geodesic box in Schwarzschild, and (iii) uniformly accelerated box in Minkowski. Finally, we extend these results to $N$ particle systems in the massless (ultra-relativistic) limit for certain restricted class of spacetimes.
Comment: 26 pages