The first law of black hole mechanics in the Einstein-Maxwell theory revisited

Abstract

We re-derive the first law of black hole mechanics in the context of the Einstein-Maxwell theory in a gauge-invariant way introducing “momentum maps” associated to field strengths and the vectors that generate their symmetries. These objects play the role of generalized thermodynamical potentials in the first law and satisfy generalized zeroth laws, as first observed in the context of principal gauge bundles by Prabhu, but they can be generalized to more complex situations. We test our ideas on the d-dimensional Reissner-Nordström-Tangherlini black hole.