We take a first step towards a holographic description of a black hole by means of a flow equation. We consider a free theory of multiple scalar fields at finite temperature and study its holographic geometry defined through a free flow of the scalar fields. We find that the holographic metric has the following properties: i) It is an asymptotic Anti-de Sitter (AdS) black brane metric with some unknown matter contribution. ii) It has no coordinate singularity and milder curvature singularity. iii) Its time component decays exponentially at a certain AdS radial slice. We find that the matter spreads all over the space, which we speculate to be due to thermal excitation of infinitely many massless higher spin fields. We conjecture that the above three are generic features of a black hole holographically realized by the flow equation method.
Higher-dimensional scenarios allow for the formation of mini-black holes from TeV-scale particle collisions. The purpose of this paper is to review and compare different methods for the estimate of the total gravitational energy emitted in this process. To date, black hole formation has mainly been studied using an apparent horizon search technique. This approach yields only an upper bound on the gravitational energy emitted during black hole formation. Alternative calculations based on instantaneous collisions of point particles and black hole perturbation theory suggest that the emitted grav…
With the recent discovery that many aspects of black hole thermodynamics can be effectively reduced to problems in three spacetime dimensions, it has become increasingly important to understand the ``statistical mechanics'' of the (2+1)-dimensional black hole of Banados, Teitelboim, and Zanelli (BTZ). Several conformal field theoretic derivations of the BTZ entropy exist, but none is completely satisfactory, and many questions remain open: there is no consensus as to what fields provide the relevant degrees of freedom or where these excitations live. In this paper, I review some of the unresol…
If string theory describes nature, then charged black holes are not described by the Reissner-Nordstrom solution. This solution must be modified to include a massive dilaton. In the limit of vanishing dilaton mass, the new solution can be found by a generalization of the Harrison transformation for the Einstein-Maxwell equations. These two solution generating transformations and the resulting black holes are compared. It is shown that the extremal black hole with massless dilaton can be viewed as the ``square root" of the extremal Reissner-Nordstrom solution. When the dilaton mass is included,…
Combining insights from both the effective field theory of quantum gravity and black hole thermodynamics, we derive two novel consistency relations to be satisfied by any quantum theory of gravity. First, we show that a particular combination of the number of massless (light) fields in the theory must take integer values. Second, we show that, once the massless spectrum is fixed, the Wilson coefficient of the Kretschmann scalar in the low-energy effective theory is fully determined by the logarithm of a single natural number.
A massless scalar field exhibits an instability at the event horizon of an extreme black hole. We study numerically the nonlinear evolution of this instability for spherically symmetric perturbations of an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom (RN) black hole. We find that generically the endpoint of the instability is a non-extreme RN solution. However, there exist fine-tuned initial perturbations for which the instability never decays. In this case, the perturbed spacetime describes a time-dependent extreme black hole. Such solutions settle down to extreme RN outside, but not on, the event horizon. The…
We investigate the potential impact of mass inflation inside black holes on the dynamics of the Universe, considering a recent reformulation of general relativity, proposed in [1], which prevents the vacuum energy from acting as a gravitational source. The interior dynamics of accreting black holes is studied, at the classical level, using the homogeneous approximation and taking charge as a surrogate for angular momentum. We show that, depending on the accreting fluid properties, mass inflation inside black holes could influence the value of the cosmological constant and thus the dynamics of …
We show that the Letelier-Gal'tsov (LG) metric describing multiple crossed strings in relative motion does solve the Einstein equations, in spite of the discontinuity uncovered recently by Krasnikov [gr-qc/0502090] provided the strings are straight and moving with constant velocities.
The near horizon limit of the extremal BTZ black hole is a``self-dual orbifold'' of AdS_3. This geometry has a null circle on its boundary, and thus the dual field theory is a Discrete Light Cone Quantized (DLCQ) two dimensional CFT. The same geometry can be compactified to two dimensions giving AdS_2 with a constant electric field. The kinematics of the DLCQ show that in a consistent quantum theory of gravity in these backgrounds there can be no dynamics in AdS_2, which is consistent with older ideas about instabilities in this space. We show how the necessary boundary conditions eliminating …
The holographic principle relates (classical) gravitational waves in the bulk to quantum fluctuations and the Weyl anomaly of a conformal field theory on the boundary (the brane). One can thus argue that linear perturbations in the bulk of static black holes located on the brane be related to the Hawking flux and that (brane-world) black holes are therefore unstable. We try to gain some information on such instability from established knowledge of the Hawking radiation on the brane. In this context, the well-known trace anomaly is used as a measure of both the validity of the holographic pictu…
A brief, and certainly not exhaustive, survey is provided of some recent results and conjectures in four and higher spacetime dimensions, such as the Hoop Conjecture, relating the geometry of event horizons to dynamical quantities such as the total energy or mass of the spacetime containng the black hole. As a measure of the size of a hoop one may take Birkhoff's invariant based on sweepouts by circles or higher dimensional analogues or one may take the length of the shortest non-trivial closed geodesic. Also discussed are whether one can hear the shape of a black hole and to what extent one m…
Exploring the characterization of singular black hole spacetimes, we study the relation between energy density, curvature invariants, and geodesic completeness using a quadratic $f(R)$ gravity theory coupled to an anisotropic fluid. Working in a metric-affine approach, our models and solutions represent minimal extensions of General Relativity (GR) in the sense that they rapidly recover the usual Reissner-Nordström solution from near the inner horizon outwards. The anisotropic fluid helps modify only the innermost geometry. Depending on the values and signs of two parameters on the gravitation…
Standard calculations suggest that the entropy of our universe is dominated by black holes, whose entropy is of order their area in Planck units, although they comprise only a tiny fraction of its total energy. Statistical entropy is the logarithm of the number of microstates consistent with the observed macroscopic properties of a system, hence a measure of uncertainty about its precise state. Therefore, assuming unitarity in black hole evaporation, the standard results suggest that the largest uncertainty in the future quantum state of the universe is due to the Hawking radiation from evapor…
The time evolution of strongly exited SU(2) Bogomolny-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) magnetic monopoles in Minkowski spacetime is investigated by means of numerical simulations based on the technique of conformal compactification and on the use of hyperboloidal initial value problem. It is found that an initially static monopole does not radiate the entire energy of the exciting pulse toward future null infinity. Rather, a long-lasting quasi-stable `breathing state' develops in the central region and certain expanding shell structures -- built up by very high frequency oscillations -- are formed in …
This article aims to explain some of the basic facts about the questions raised in the title, without the technical details that are available in the literature. We provide a gentle introduction to some rather classical results about quantum field theory in curved spacetime and about the thermodynamic limit of quantum statistical mechanics. We also briefly explain that these results have an analog in the large N limit of gauge theory.
Recently, the Thakurta metric has been adopted as a model of primordial black holes. We show that the spacetime described by this metric has neither black-hole event horizon nor black-hole trapping horizon and involves the violation of all the standard energy conditions as a solution of the Einstein equation. Therefore, this metric does not describe a cosmological black hole in the early universe. It is pointed out that a contradictory claim by the other group stems from an incorrect choice of sign.
It is not known what the limitations are on using quantum computation to speed up classical computation. An example would be the power to speed up PSPACE-complete computations. It is also not known what the limitations are on the duration of time over which classical general relativity can describe the interior geometry of black holes. What is known is that these two questions are closely connected: the longer GR can describe black holes, the more limited are quantum computers. This conclusion, formulated as a theorem, is a result of unpublished work done by Scott Aaronson and myself which I e…
We discuss some possible relationships in gauge theories, string theory and M theory in the light of some recent results obtained in gauge invariant supersymmetric quantum mechanics. In particular this reveals a new relationship between the gauge group E_8 and 11-dimensional space.
What do simple clocks, simple computers, black holes, space-time foam, and holographic principle have in common? I will show that the physics behind them is inter-related, linking together our concepts of information, gravity, and quantum uncertainty. Thus, the physics that sets the limits to computation and clock precision also yields Hawking radiation of black holes and the holographic principle. Moreover, the latter two strongly imply that space-time undergoes much larger quantum fluctuations than what the folklore suggests --- large enough to be detected with modern gravitational-wave inte…
The discovery that black holes emit thermal type radiation changed radically our perception of their behavior. Until then, their interior was considered as causally disconnected from the rest of the universe, so any kind of information, that went down the black hole, was believed to remain eternally trapped in it. The emission of the aforementioned radiation means that some amount of information eventually returns to the universe outside the black hole. The question then rises whether it is the whole of this information that goes back to the universe during the black hole evaporation or not. N…
According to Susskind, a string falling toward a black hole spreads exponentially over the stretched horizon due to repulsive interactions of the string bits. In this paper such a string is modeled as a self-avoiding walk and the string entropy is found. It is shown that the rate at which information/entropy contained in the string spreads is the maximum rate allowed by quantum theory. The maximum rate at which the black hole entropy can increase when a string falls into a black hole is also discussed.
The issue of the vacuum energy of quantum fields is briefly reviewed. It is argued that this energy is normally either much too large or much too small to account for the dark energy, However, there are a few proposals in which it would be of the order needed to effect the dynamics of the present day universe. Backreaction models are reviewed, and the question of whether quantum effects can react against a cosmological constant is discussed.
As we follow our Universe to early times, we find that matter was crushed to high densities, somewhat similar to the behavior at a black hole singularity. String theory has made progress in explaining the internal structure of black holes, so we would like to extrapolate the ideas learnt from black holes to the early Universe. If we assume that we want the most probable state of the Universe at early times, then we should look at the kind of state that describes a generic black hole. This suggests a definite equation of state for the matter in the early Universe. Quantum effects can stretch ac…
It has been argued that small corrections to evolution arising from non-geometric effects can resolve the information paradox. We can get such effects, for example, from subleading saddle points in the Euclidean path integral. But an inequality derived in 2009 using strong sub-additivity showed that such corrections {\it cannot} solve the problem. As a result we sharpen the original Hawking puzzle: we must either have (A) new (nonlocal) physics or (B) construct hair at the horizon. We get correspondingly different approaches to resolving the AMPS puzzle. Traditional complementarity assumes (A)…
A localised particle in Quantum Mechanics is described by a wave packet in position space, regardless of its energy. However, from the point of view of General Relativity, if the particle's energy density exceeds a certain threshold, it should be a black hole. In order to combine these two pictures, we introduce a horizon wave-function determined by the position wave-function, which yields the probability that the particle is a black hole. The existence of a (fuzzy) minimum mass for black holes naturally follows, and we also show that our construction entails an effective Generalised Uncertain…
In the context of massive gravity theories, we study holographic flows driven by a relevant scalar operator and interpolating between a UV 3-dimensional CFT and a trans-IR Kasner universe. For a large class of scalar potentials, the Cauchy horizon never forms in presence of a non-trivial scalar hair, although, in absence of it, the black hole solution has an inner horizon due to the finite graviton mass. We show that the instability of the Cauchy horizon triggered by the scalar field is associated to a rapid collapse of the Einstein-Rosen bridge. The corresponding flows run smoothly through th…
According to Babichev et al., the accretion of a phantom test fluid onto a Schwarzschild black hole will induce the mass of the black hole to decrease, however the backreaction was ignored in their calculation. Using new exact solutions describing black holes in a background Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe, we find that the physical black hole mass may instead increase due to the accretion of phantom energy. If this is the case, and the future universe is dominated by phantom dark energy, the black hole apparent horizon and the cosmic apparent horizon will eventually coincide and, after th…
Hawking's radiance, even as computed without account of backreaction, departs from blackbody form due to the mode dependence of the barrier penetration factor. Thus the radiation is not the maximal entropy radiation for given energy. By comparing estimates of the actual entropy emission rate with the maximal entropy rate for the given power, and using standard ideas from communication theory, we set an upper bound on the permitted information outflow rate. This is several times the rates of black hole entropy decrease or radiation entropy production. Thus, if subtle quantum effects not heretof…
Arguments presented in an earlier paper, demonstrating the breakdown of global supersymmetry in Hawking radiation from a generic four dimensional black hole with infalling massless scalar and spinor particles, are reexamined. Careful handling of the Grassmann-valued spinorial parameter is shown to lead to a situation wherein supersymmetry may not actually break. A comparative analysis in flat spacetime at a finite temperature, is also presented.
We discuss the relations between swampland conjectures and observational constraints on both inflation and dark energy. Using the requirement $|\nabla V|\geq c V$, with $c$ as a universal constant whose value can be derived from inflation, there may be no observable distinction between constant and non-constant models of dark energy. However, the latest modification of the above conjecture, which utilizes the second derivative of the potential, opens up the opportunity for observations to determine if the dark energy equation of state deviates from that of a cosmological constant. We also comm…
We study gravitational solutions that admit a dual CFT description and carry non zero dipole charge. We focus on the black ring solution in AdS_3 x S^3 and extract from it the one-point functions of all CFT operators dual to scalar excitations of the six-dimensional metric. In the case of small black rings, characterized by the level N, angular momentum J and dipole charge q_3, we show how the large N and J dependence of the one-point functions can be reproduced, under certain assumptions, directly from a suitable ensemble in the dual CFT. Finally we present a simple toy model that describes t…
