Entropy increase during physical processes for black holes in Lanczos-Lovelock gravity

Abstract

We study quasistationary physical process for black holes within the context of Lanczos-Lovelock gravity. We show that the Wald entropy of the stationary black holes in Lanczos-Lovelock gravity monotonically increases for quasistationary physical processes in which the horizon is perturbed by the accretion of positive energy matter and the black hole ultimately settles down to a stationary state. This result reinforces the physical interpretation of Wald entropy for Lanczos-Lovelock models and takes a step towards proving the analogue of the black hole area increase theorem in a wider class of gravitational theories.