Holographic pressure and volume for black holes

Abstract We advocate for a holographic definition of thermodynamic pressure and volume for black holes based on quasi-local gravitational thermodynamics. When a black hole is enclosed by a finite timelike boundary, York’s quasi-local first law includes a surface pressure conjugate to the boundary area. Assuming the existence of a holographically dual theory living on this boundary, these geometric quantities correspond to the pressure and volume of the dual thermal system. In this work we focus on static, spherically symmetric black holes, for which these quantities reduce to global thermodynamic variables. The holographic volume provides a notion of system size, allowing extensivity to be defined in standard thermodynamic terms, and it yields a definition of the large-system limit. For the asymptotically flat case, we show that, in the canonical thermodynamic representation, small Schwarzschild black holes are non-extensive, whereas large black holes become extensive in the large-system limit. A similar conclusion applies to Anti-de Sitter Schwarzschild black holes, with the difference that the quasi-local energy of the large black hole also becomes extensive in the large-system limit. Before this limit, the energy decomposes into subextensive and extensive contributions, and we derive an explicit expression for the extensive part as a function of the finite volume and entropy.