Related papers: Horizons 2020
The recent observation of gravitational waves confirms one of the most interesting predictions in general relativity: the black holes. Because the gravitational waves detected by LIGO fit very well within general relativity as a phenomenon…
Any spacetime containing a degenerate Killing horizon, such as an extremal black hole, possesses a well-defined notion of a near-horizon geometry. We review such near-horizon geometry solutions in a variety of dimensions and theories in a…
Although we know that black holes are characterized by a temperature and an entropy, we do not yet have a satisfactory microscopic ``statistical mechanical'' explanation for black hole thermodynamics. I describe a new approach that…
Asymptotic symmetries are known to constrain the infrared behaviour of scattering processes in asymptotically flat spacetimes. By the same token, one expects symmetries of the black hole horizon to constrain near-horizon gravitational…
In this paper we treat the black hole horizon as a physical boundary to the spacetime and study its dynamics following from the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term. Using the Kerr black hole as an example we derive an effective action that…
What is going on (as of August 2008) at the interface between theoretical general relativity, string-inspired models, and observational astrophysics? Quite a lot. In this mini-survey I will make a personal choice and focus on four specific…
I present a viewpoint on black hole thermodynamics according to which the entropy: derives from horizon "degrees of freedom"; is finite because the deep structure of spacetime is discrete; is "objective" thanks to the distinguished coarse…
We take the view that the area of a black hole's event horizon is quantized, $A = l_P^2 \, (4 \ln 2) \, N$, and the associated degrees of freedom are finite in number and of fermionic nature. We then investigate general aspects of the…
It is shown that in the extreme limit with a zero surface gravity but nonzero local temperature the limiting metric of a generic static black hole is determined by a metric induced on a horizon and one function of two coordinates,…
It is congruous with the quantum nature of the world to view the space-time geometry as an emergent structure that shows classical features only at some observational level. One can thus conceive the space-time manifold as a purely…
Our understanding of space and time is probed to its depths by black holes. These objects, which appear as a natural consequence of general relativity, provide a powerful analytical tool able to examine macroscopic and microscopic…
Black hole event horizons and cosmological event horizons share many properties, making it natural to ask whether our recent advances in understanding black holes generalize to cosmology. To this end, we discuss a paradox that occurs if…
While in general relativity black holes can be freely embedded into a cosmological background, the same problem in brane-worlds is much more cumbersome. We present here the results obtained so far in the explicit constructions of such…
We use group theoretic methods to obtain the extended Lie point symmetries of the quantum dynamics of a scalar particle probing the near horizon structure of a black hole. Symmetries of the classical equations of motion for a charged…
Classical black holes and event horizons are highly non-local objects, defined in terms of the causal past of future null infinity. Alternative, (quasi)local definitions are often used in mathematical, quantum, and numerical relativity.…
We determine coherent states peaked at classical space-time of the Schwarzschild black hole in the frame-work of canonical quantisation of general relativity. The information about the horizon is naturally encoded in the phase space…
We study the probability that a horizon appears when concentric shells of matter collide, by computing the horizon wave-function of the system. We mostly consider the collision of two ultra-relativistic shells, both shrinking and expanding,…
The quasi-local notion of an isolated horizon is employed to study the entropy of black holes without any particular symmetry in loop quantum gravity. The idea of characterizing the shape of a horizon by a sequence of local areas is…
We discuss whether black holes could persist in a universe which recollapses and then bounces into a new expansion phase. Whether the bounce is of classical or quantum gravitational origin, such cosmological models are of great current…
We explore the spacetime structure near non-extremal horizons in any spacetime dimension greater than two and discover a wealth of novel results: 1. Different boundary conditions are specified by a functional of the dynamical variables,…