Stability of the microcanonical ensemble in Euclidean Quantum Gravity

Abstract

Abstract This work resolves a longstanding tension between the physically-expected stability of the microcanonical ensemble for gravitating systems and the fact that the known negative mode of the asymptotically flat Schwarzschild black hole decays too rapidly at infinity to affect the ADM energy boundary term at infinity. The key to our study is that we fix an appropriate off-shell notion of energy, which we obtain by constructing the microcanonical partition function as an integral transform of the canonical partition function. After applying the rule-of-thumb for Wick rotations from our recent companion paper to deal with the conformal mode problem of Euclidean gravity, we find a positive definite action for linear perturbations about any Euclidean Schwarzchild (-AdS) black hole. Most of our work is done in a cavity with reflecting boundary conditions, but the cavity wall can be removed by taking an appropriate limit.