Higher Curvature Gravity: Entropy Bound and Causality Violation

In any quantum theory of gravity we do expect corrections to Einstein gravity to occur. Yet, at fundamental level, it is not apparent what the most relevant corrections are. We argue that the generic curvature square corrections present in lower dimensional actions of various compactified string theories provide a natural passage between the classical and quantum realms of gravity. The Gauss-Bonnet and (Riemann)2 gravities, in particular, provide concrete examples in which inconsistency of a theory, such as, a violation of microcausality, and a classical limit on black hole entropy are correlated. In such theories the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density, η/s, can be smaller than for a boundary conformal field theory with Einstein gravity dual. This result is interesting from the viewpoint that the nuclear matter or quark-gluon plasma produced (such as at RHIC) under extreme densities and temperatures may violate the conjectured bound η/s ≥ 1/4π, albeit marginal. We also explore the possibility that the Gauss-Bonnet gravity plays the intermediatory role between classical and quantum theories of gravity.