A Note on the Cardy-Verlinde Formula.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - t h / 0 2 0 1 2 6 8 v 1 3 1 J a n 2 0 0 2 IC/2002/4 hep-th/0201268 A Note on the Cardy-Verlinde Formula Donam Youm1 ICTP, Strada Costiera 11, 34014 Trieste, Italy Abstract We generalize the results of hep-th/0008140 to the case of the (n+ 1)-dimensional closed FRW universe satisfying a general equation of state of the form p = wρ. We find that the entropy of the universe can no longer be expressed in a form similar to the Cardy formula, when w 6= 1/n. As a result, in general the entropy formula does not coincide with the Friedmann equation when the conjectured bound on the Casimir energy is saturated. Furthermore, the conjectured bound on the Casimir energy generally does not lead to the Hubble and the Bekenstein entropy bounds. January, 2002 1E-mail: youmd@ictp.trieste.it Verlinde [1] made an interesting proposal that the Cardy formula [2] for the two- dimensional CFT can be generalized to arbitrary spacetime dimensions. Verlinde fur- ther proposed that a closed universe has subextensive (Casimir) contribution to its energy and entropy with the Casimir energy conjectured to be bounded from above by the Bekenstein-Hawking energy. Within the context of the radiation dominated universe, such bound on the Casimir energy is shown to lead to the Hubble and the Bekenstein entropy bounds respectively for the strongly and the weakly self-gravitating universes. The generalized entropy formula, called the Cardy-Verlinde formula, is fur- ther shown to coincide with the Friedmann equation at the moment when the conjec- tured bound on the Casimir energy is saturated. These results were later generalized [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29] to brane universes in the bulks of various (A)dS black holes. It is the purpose of this note to examine whether the above mentioned results of Ref. [1] are generic properties of the (n+1)-dimensional closed Friedmann-Robertson- Walker (FRW) universe satis