Related papers: Interface of General Relativity, Quantum Physics 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…
This is an introductory, up-to-date review of the essentials of black hole thermodynamics. The main topics surveyed are: (i) the four laws of thermodynamics as applied to a black hole horizon, and the current status of their proofs; (ii)…
Quasi-static systems are an important concept in thermodynamics: they are dynamic but close enough to equilibrium that many properties of equilibrium systems still hold. Slowly evolving horizons are the corresponding concept for…
This letter presents a new, solely thermodynamical argument for considering the states of the quantum isolated horizon of a black hole as distinguishable. We claim that only if the states are distinguishable, the thermodynamic entropy is an…
Recently a multidimensional generalization of Isolated Horizon framework has been proposed by Lewandowski and Pawlowski (gr-qc/0410146). Therein the geometric description was easily generalized to higher dimensions and the structure of the…
From the microscopic point of view, realistic black holes are time-dependent and the teleological concept of event horizon fails. At present, the apparent or the trapping horizon seem its best replacements in various areas of black hole…
Mechanics of non-rotating black holes was recently generalized by replacing the static event horizons used in standard treatments with `isolated horizons.' This framework is extended to incorporate dilaton couplings. Since there can be…
To explain black hole thermodynamics in quantum gravity, one must introduce constraints to ensure that a black hole is actually present. I show that for a large class of black holes, such ``horizon constraints'' allow the use of conformal…
When black holes are dynamical, event horizons are replaced by apparent and trapping horizons. Conformal and Kerr-Schild transformations are widely used in relation with dynamical black holes and we study the behaviour under such…
We discuss some of the drawbacks of using event horizons to define black holes. The reasons are both practical, physical and theoretical. We argue that locally defined trapping horizons can remedy many of these drawbacks. We examine of the…
While the early literature on black holes focused on event horizons, subsequently it was realized that their teleological nature makes them unsuitable for many physical applications both in classical and quantum gravity. Therefore, over the…
The gravitational force harbours a fundamental instability against collapse. In standard General Relativity without Quantum Mechanics, this implies the existence of black holes as natural, stable solutions of Einstein's equations. If one…
Black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, and a central task of any quantum theory of gravity is to explain these thermal properties. A statistical mechanical description of black hole entropy once seemed remote, but today we suffer an…
With the recent progress in observations of astrophysical black holes, it has become more important to understand in detail the physics of strongly gravitating horizonless objects. If the objects identified in the observations are indeed…
Using the recent thermodynamical study of isolated horizons by Ghosh and Perez, we provide a statistical mechanical analysis of isolated horizons near equilibrium in the grand canonical ensemble. By matching the description of the dynamical…
With a help of a generalized Raychaudhuri equation non-expanding null surfaces are studied in arbitrarily dimensional case. The definition and basic properties of non-expanding and isolated horizons known in the literature in the 4 and 3…
Since the 1970's it has been known that black hole (and other) horizons are truly thermodynamic in nature. More generally, surfaces which are not horizons have also been conjectured to behave thermodynamically. Initially, for surfaces…
We construct the spacetime in the vicinity of a general isolated, rotating, charged black hole. The black hole is modeled as a weakly isolated horizon, and we use the characteristic initial value formulation of the Einstein equations with…
The thermodynamic inconsistency observed in regular black holes is resolved through the framework of reduced thermodynamic phase spaces. We demonstrate that regular black holes are essentially induced from singular black holes by adding an…
We consider the thermodynamic properties of the constant curvature black hole solution recently found by Banados. We show that it is possible to compute the entropy and the quasilocal thermodynamics of the spacetime using the…