Gravitational entropies in LTB dust models

Abstract

We consider generic Lemaître–Tolman–Bondi (LTB) dust models to probe the gravitational entropy proposals of Clifton, Ellis and Tavakol (CET) and of Hosoya and Buchert (HB). We also consider a variant of the HB proposal based on a suitable quasi-local scalar weighted average. We show that the conditions for entropy growth for all proposals are directly related to a negative correlation of similar fluctuations of the energy density and Hubble scalar. While this correlation is evaluated locally for the CET proposal, it must be evaluated in a non-local domain dependent manner for the two HB proposals. By looking at the fulfilment of these conditions at the relevant asymptotic limits we are able to provide a well grounded qualitative description of the full time evolution and radial asymptotic scaling of the three entropies in generic models. The following rigorous analytic results are obtained for the three proposals: (i) entropy grows when the density growing mode is dominant, (ii) all ever-expanding hyperbolic models reach a stable terminal equilibrium characterized by an inhomogeneous entropy maximum in their late time evolution; (iii) regions with decaying modes and collapsing elliptic models exhibit unstable equilibria associated with an entropy minimum (iv) near singularities the CET entropy diverges while the HB entropies converge; (v) the CET entropy converges for all models in the radial asymptotic range, whereas the HB entropies only converge for models asymptotic to a Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker background. The fact that different independent proposals yield fairly similar conditions for entropy production, time evolution and radial scaling in generic LTB models seems to suggest that their common notion of a ‘gravitational entropy’ may be a theoretically robust concept applicable to more general spacetimes.