Entropy in Born-Infeld Gravity

Abstract: There is a class of higher derivative gravity theories that are in some sense natural extensions of cosmological Einstein's gravity with a unique maximally symmetric classical vacuum and only a massless spin-2 excitation about the vacuum and no other perturbative modes. These theories are of the Born-Infeld determinantal form. We show that the macroscopic dynamical entropy as defined by Wald for bifurcate Killing horizons in these theories are equivalent to the geometric Bekenstein-Hawking entropy (or more properly Gibbons-Hawking entropy for the case of de Sitter spacetime) but given with an effective gravitational constant which encodes all the information about the background spacetime and the underlying theory. We also show that the higher curvature terms increase the entropy. We carry out the computations in generic n-dimensions including the particularly interesting limits of three, four and infinite number of dimensions. We also give a preliminary discussion about the black hole entropy in generic dimensions for the BI theories.