Black hole entropy, curved space and monsters

Understand

We investigate the microscopic origin of black hole entropy, in particular the gap between the maximum entropy of ordinary matter and that of black holes.

• Using curved space, we construct configurations with entropy greater than their area in Planck units.
• These configurations have pathological properties and we refer to them as monsters.
• When monsters are excluded we recover the entropy bound on ordinary matter $S < A^{3/4}$.