Cartan invariants and event horizon detection

Abstract

We show that it is possible to locate the event horizon of a black hole (in arbitrary dimensions) by the zeros of certain Cartan invariants. This approach accounts for the recent results on the detection of stationary horizons using scalar polynomial curvature invariants, and improves upon them since the proposed method is computationally less expensive. As an application, we produce Cartan invariants that locate the event horizons for various exact four-dimensional and five-dimensional stationary, asymptotically flat (or (anti) de Sitter), black hole solutions and compare the Cartan invariants with the corresponding scalar curvature invariants that detect the event horizon.