Quantum statistical treatment of Verlinde’s conjecture in a Tsallis framework

Abstract

Verlinde has recently conjectured, via a Beckenstein-like thought experiment, that gravitation, instead of being an elementary force, is an emergent entropic one. This rather surprising conjecture was actually proved in Plastino and Rocca (2018), in a strictly classical statistical mechanics’ environment. In this Communication, we work in a quantum statistical context to consider the conjecture in the case of bosons/fermions, in a Tsallis’ framework. We prove that Tsallis’ entropy is the operating potential energy in this quantum treatment, something that does not happen in the case of Boltzmann–Gibbs’ entropy. In the classical limit, we show that the emergent force has a Newtonian dependence with the distance.