Currents and radiation from the large D black hole membrane

Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated that black hole dynamics in a large number of dimensions D reduces to the dynamics of a codimension one membrane propagating in flat space. In this paper we define a stress tensor and charge current on this membrane and explicitly determine these currents at low orders in the expansion in frac{1}{D} . We demonstrate that dynamical membrane equations of motion derived in earlier work are simply conservation equations for our stress tensor and charge current. Through the paper we focus on solutions of the membrane equations which vary on a time scale of order unity. Even though the charge current and stress tensor are not parametrically small in such solutions, we show that the radiation sourced by the corresponding membrane currents is generically of order frac{1}{D^D} . In this regime it follows that the ‘near horizon’ membrane degrees of freedom are decoupled from asymptotic flat space at every perturbative order in the frac{1}{D} expansion. We also define an entropy current on the membrane and use the Hawking area theorem to demonstrate that the divergence of the entropy current is point wise non negative. We view this result as a local form of the second law of thermodynamics for membrane motion.