Boundary Effects on the Thermodynamics of Quantum Fields Near a Black Hole

Abstract: We study the thermodynamics of a quantum field in a spherical shell around a static black hole. We implement brick wall regularization by imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions on the field at the boundaries and analyze their effects on the free energy and the entropy. We also consider the possibility of using Neumann boundary conditions. We examine both bosonic and fermionic fields in Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN), extreme RN, and dilatonic backgrounds. We show that the horizon divergences get contributions from the boundary (brick wall) which at the Hawking temperature are comparable to the bulk contributions. It is also shown that the leading divergence is the same for all the backgrounds considered and that the subleading logarithmic divergence is given by a specific function of surface gravity and horizon area. We will also consider the near horizon geometry and show the existence of a finite term gen- erated by the logarithmic divergence which involves the logarithm of the horizon area. The thermodynamics of quantum fields is examined in the ultrarelavisitc regime through the high temperature/small mass expansion. We derive the high temperature expansion in the presence of chemical potential by Mellin transform and heat kernel methods as applied to the harmonic sum representation of the free energy.