Landauer's Principle as a Criterion for Thermodynamic Consistency in Generalized Black Hole Entropies

Abstract

Under the assumption that black hole horizon area is quantized, each Hawking evaporation step, during which the black hole loses mass and transitions to a lower area level, is interpreted as the erasure of one bit of information. In this paper, by employing Landauer's principle, we test the consistency of various black hole entropy relations with this information-theoretic framework. For the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the energy emitted per step saturates the Landauer bound. We extend this analysis to a broad class of generalized entropy models, yielding three distinct outcomes. In the first category, Landauer's principle imposes constraints on the Hawking temperature and, consequently, on the black hole mass. In the second, it restricts the free parameters of the entropy model. The third category, exemplified by Kaniadakis entropy, proves incompatible with Landauer's principle. For all compatible models, we derive the area quantization parameter and the corresponding area spectrum. While this parameter is constant for Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, it becomes level-number-dependent for many generalized models. Nonetheless, the relative spacing between successive area levels vanishes in the classical limit. Our findings point to a deep link between information theory and black hole thermodynamics.