Area-entropy relation for spherical symmetric black holes

According to Gibbons and Hawking, a non-extremal black hole's entropy is de termined by the surface term of the gravitational action integrating on the horizon. In this paper, we use the surface term of Landau and Lifshitz to obtain the relation S = 1/4A for four dimensional and higher dimensional sp herical symmetric black holes. The results stand for spherical symmetric bl ack holes in general relativity, superstring theories, and brane theories. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.