Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2020) 135: 483
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00451-3

Regular Article

Near horizon symmetries, emergence of Goldstone modes and thermality

Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, 781039, Guwahati, Assam, India

^c bibhas.majhi@iitg.ac.in

Received: 5 December 2019
Accepted: 12 May 2020
Published online: 8 June 2020

Abstract

For a long time, it is believed that black hole horizon is thermal and quantum mechanical in nature. The microscopic origin of this thermality is the main question behind our present investigation, which reveals possible importance of near horizon symmetry. It is this symmetry which is assumed to be spontaneously broken by the background spacetime, generates the associated Goldstone modes. In this paper, we construct a suitable classical action for those Goldstone modes and show that all the momentum modes experience nearly the same inverted harmonic potential, leading to an instability. Thanks to the recent conjectures on the chaos and thermal quantum system, particularly in the context of an inverted harmonic oscillator system. Going into the quantum regime, the system of large number of Goldstone modes with the aforementioned instability is shown to be inherently thermal. Interestingly, the temperature of the system also turns out to be proportional to that of the well-known horizon temperature. Therefore, we hope our present study can illuminate an intimate connection between the horizon symmetries and the associated Goldstone modes as a possible mechanism of the microscopic origin of the horizon thermality.