We outline how the Wald entropy formula naturally arises in loop quantum gravity based on recently introduced dimension-independent connection variables. The key observation is that in a loop quantization of a generalized gravity theory, the analog of the area operator turns out to measure, morally speaking, the Wald entropy rather than the area. We discuss the explicit example of (higher-dimensional) Lanczos-Lovelock gravity and comment on recent work on finding the correct numerical prefactor of the entropy by comparing it to a semiclassical effective action.

• Received 28 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084054