2D black holes, conformal vacua and CFTs on the cylinder

We investigate two-dimensional dilaton gravity models with a power-law dila ton potential, whose black hole solutions contain, among others, the dimens ional reduction of the Schwarzschild black hole, the anti-de Sitter black h ole and Rindler spacetime. We show that the ground state of these models sa tisfies simple transformation laws under the SL(2, R) conformal group. We u se these transformation laws to explain the scaling behavior of the thermod ynamical parameters of the black hole and the nonextensivity of the thermod ynamical system. The black hole thermodynamical behavior, in particular its entropy, is reproduced by a mapping into a two-dimensional conformal field theory on the cylinder. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science BN. All fights reserved.