New Area Law in General Relativity.
We report a new area law in general relativity. A future holographic screen is a hypersurface foliated by marginally trapped surfaces. We show that their area increases monotonically along the foliation. Future holographic screens can easily be found in collapsing stars and near a big crunch. Past holographic screens exist in any expanding universe and obey a similar theorem, yielding the first rigorous area law in big bang cosmology. Unlike event horizons, these objects can be identified at finite time and without reference to an asymptotic boundary. The Bousso bound is not used, but it naturally suggests a thermodynamic interpretation of our result.
Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Raphael
R
Bousso
Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
Netta
N
Engelhardt