Near-Extreme Black Holes and the Universal Relaxation Bound

Abstract

A fundamental bound on the relaxation time τof a perturbed thermodynamical system has recently been derived, τ\geq \hbar/πT, where $T$ is the system's temperature. We demonstrate analytically that black holes saturate this bound in the extremal limit and for large values of the azimuthal number m of the perturbation field.

2 Pages. Submitted to PRD on 5/12/2007