Bulk-boundary thermodynamic equivalence, and the Bekenstein and cosmic-censorship bounds for rotating charged AdS black holes

Abstract

We show that one may pass from bulk to boundary thermodynamic quantities for rotating anti-de Sitter (AdS) black holes in arbitrary dimensions so that if the bulk quantities satisfy the first law of thermodynamics then so do the boundary conformal field theory (CFT) quantities. This corrects recent claims that boundary CFT quantities satisfying the first law may only be obtained using bulk quantities measured with respect to a certain frame rotating at infinity, and which therefore do not satisfy the first law. We show that the bulk black-hole thermodynamic variables, or equivalently therefore the boundary CFT variables, do not always satisfy a Cardy-Verlinde type formula, but they do always satisfy an AdS-Bekenstein bound. The universal validity of the Bekenstein bound is a consequence of the more fundamental cosmic-censorship bound, which we find to hold in all cases examined. We also find that at fixed entropy, the temperature of a rotating black hole is bounded above by that of a nonrotating black hole, in four and five dimensions, but not in six or more dimensions. We find evidence for universal upper bounds for the area of cosmological event horizons and black-hole horizons in rotating black-hole spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant.