Near-Horizon Geometry and the Entropy of a Minimally Coupled Scalar Field in the Schwarzschild Black Hole

In this article, we will discuss a Lorentzian sector calculation of the entropy of a minimally coupled scalar field in the Schwarzschild black hole background using the brick wall model of 't Hooft. In the original article, the WKB approximation was used for the modes that are globally stationary. In a previous article, we found that the WKB quantization rule together with a proper counting of the states, leads to a new expression of the scalar field entropy which is not proportional to the area of the horizon. The expression of the entropy is logarithmically divergent in the brick wall cut-off parameter in contrast to an inverse power divergence obtained earlier. In this article, we will consider the entropy for a thin shell of matter field of a given thickness surrounding the black hole horizon. The thickness is chosen to be large compared with the Planck length and is of the order of the atomic scale. When expressed in terms of a covariant cut-off parameter, the entropy of a thin shell of matter field of a given thickness and surrounding the horizon in the Schwarzschild black hole background is given by an expression proportional to the area of the black hole horizon. This leading order divergent term in the cut-off parameter remains to be logarithmically divergent. The logarithmic divergence is expected from the nature of the solution in the near-horizon region. We will find that these discussions are significant in the context of the continuation to the Euclidean sector and the corresponding regularization schemes used to evaluate the thermodynamical properties of matter fields in curved spaces. These are related with the geometric aspects of curved spaces. The above discussions are also important in presence of cosmological event horizon.