Hamiltonian thermodynamics of two-dimensional vacuum dilatonic black holes

We consider the Hamiltonian dynamics and thermodynamics of the two-dimensional vacuum dilatonic black hole in the presence of a timelike boundary with a fixed value of the dilaton field. A canonical transformation, previously developed by Varadarajan and Lau, allows a reduction of the classical dynamics into an unconstrained Hamiltonian system with one canonical pair of degrees of freedom. The reduced theory is quantized, and a partition function of a canonical ensemble is obtained as the trace of the analytically continued time evolution operator. The partition function exists for any value of the dilaton field and of the temperature at the boundary, and the heat capacity is always positive. For temperatures higher than beta(c)(-1)=<(h)over bar lambda>/(2 pi), the partition function is dominated by a classical black hole solution, and the dominant contribution to the entropy is the two-dimensional Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. For temperatures lower than beta(c)(-1), the partition function remains well behaved and the heat capacity is positive in the asymptotically hat space limit, in contrast with the corresponding limit in four-dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein gravity; however, in this limit, the partition function is not dominated by a classical black hole solution.