ENTROPY BOUND FOR THE TM ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD IN THE HALF-EINSTEIN UNIVERSE

Abstract

An explicit calculation is given of the entropy/energy ratio for the TM modes of the electromagnetic field in the half-Einstein universe. This geometry provides a mathematically convenient and physically instructive example of how the electromagnetic and thermodynamic quantities behave as a function of the non-dimensional parameter δ = 1/2π aT, a being the scale factor and T the temperature. On physical grounds (related to the relaxation time), it is the case of small δ's that is pertinent to thermodynamics. We find that as long as δ is small, the entropy/energy ratio behaves in the same way as for the TE modes. The entropy is thus bounded. The present kind of formalism makes it convenient to study also the influence from frequency dispersion. We discuss an example where a sharp cut-off dispersion relation can in principle truncate the electromagnetic oscillations in the Einstein cavity such that only the lowest mode survives.