Killing horizons kill horizon degrees

摘要

Frequently, it is argued that the microstates responsible for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy should arise from some physical degrees of freedom located near or on the black hole horizon. In this essay, we elucidate that instead entropy may emerge from the conversion of physical degrees of freedom, attached to a generic boundary, into unobservable gauge degrees of freedom attached to the horizon. By constructing the reduced phase space, it can be demonstrated that such a transmutation indeed takes place for a large class of black holes, including Schwarzschild.