Horizon Geometry Research Articles

Supersymmetric black holes in AdS4 from very special geometry

Supersymmetric black holes in AdS spacetime are inherently interesting for the AdS/CFT correspondence. Within a four dimensional gauged supergravity theory coupled to vector multiplets, the only analytic solutions for regular, supersymmetric, static black holes in AdS4 are those in the STU-model due to Cacciatori and Klemm. We study a class of U (1)-gauged supergravity theories coupled to vector multiplets which have a cubic prepotential, the scalar manifold is then a very special Kähler manifold. When the resulting very special Kähler manifold is a homogeneous space, we find analytic solutions for static, supersymmetric AdS4 black holes with vanishing axions. The horizon geometries of our solutions are constant curvature Riemann surfaces of arbitrary genus.

AdS black holes from duality in gauged supergravity

We study and utilize duality transformations in a particular STU-model of four dimensional gauged supergravity. This model is a truncation of the de Wit-Nicolai N=8 theory and as such has a lift to eleven-dimensional supergravity on the seven-sphere. Our duality group is $U(1)^3$ and while it can be applied to any solution of this theory, we consider the known asymptotically AdS$_4$, supersymmetric black holes and focus on duality transformations which preserve supersymmetry. For static black holes we generalize the supersymmetric solutions of Cacciatori and Klemm from three magnetic charges to include two additional electric charges and argue that this is co-dimension one in the full space of supersymmetric static black holes in the STU-model. These new static black holes have nontrivial profiles for axions. For rotating black holes, we generalize the known two-parameter supersymmetric solution to include an additional parameter which represents scalar hair. When lifted to M-theory, these black holes correspond to the near horizon geometry of a stack of BPS rotating M2-branes, spinning on an $S^7$ which is fibered non-trivially over a Riemann surface.

Including realistic tidal deformations in binary black-hole initial data

A shortcoming of current binary black-hole initial data is the generation of spurious gravitational radiation, so-called junk radiation, when they are evolved. This problem is a consequence of an oversimplified modeling of the binary's physics in the initial data. Since junk radiation is not astrophysically realistic, it contaminates the actual waveforms of interest and poses a numerical nuisance. The work here presents a further step towards mitigating and understanding the origin of this issue, by incorporating post-Newtonian results in the construction of constraint-satisfying binary black-hole initial data. Here we focus on including realistic tidal deformations of the black holes in the initial data, by building on the method of superposing suitably chosen black hole metrics to compute the conformal data. We describe the details of our initial data for an equal-mass and nonspinning binary, compute the subsequent relaxation of horizon quantities in evolutions, and quantify the amount of junk radiation that is generated. These results are contrasted with those obtained with the most common choice of conformally flat (CF) initial data, as well as superposed Kerr-Schild (SKS) initial data. We find that when realistic tidal deformations are included, the early transients in the horizon geometries are significantly reduced, along with smaller deviations in the relaxed black hole masses and spins from their starting values. Likewise, the junk radiation content in the $l=2$ modes is reduced by a factor of $\sim$1.7 relative to CF initial data, but only by a factor of $\sim$1.2 relative to SKS initial data. More prominently, the junk radiation content in the $3\leq l\leq8$ modes is reduced by a factor of $\sim$5 relative to CF initial data, and by a factor of $\sim$2.4 relative to SKS initial data.

Exact quasinormal modes for the near horizon Kerr metric

We study the quasi-normal modes of a massless scalar field in a general sub-extreme Kerr back- ground by exploiting the hidden SL(2, R) x SL(2, R) x SO(3) symmetry of the subtracted geometry approximation. This faithfully models the near horizon geometry but locates the black hole in a confining asymptotically conical box analogous to the anti-de-Sitter backgrounds used in string the- ory. There are just two series of modes, given in terms of hypergeometric functions and spherical harmonics, reminiscent of the left-moving and right-moving degrees in string theory: one is over- damped, the other is underdamped and exhibits rotational splitting. The remarkably simple exact formulae for the complex frequencies would in principle allow the determination of the mass and angular momentum from observations of a black hole. No black hole bomb is possible because the Killing field which co-rotates with the horizon is everywhere timelike outside the black hole.

Black hole superradiance in dynamical spacetime

We study the superradiant scattering of gravitational waves by a nearly extremal black hole (dimensionless spin $a=0.99$) by numerically solving the full Einstein field equations, thus including backreaction effects. This allows us to study the dynamics of the black hole as it loses energy and angular momentum during the scattering process. To explore the nonlinear phase of the interaction, we consider gravitational wave packets with initial energies up to $10%$ of the mass of the black hole. We find that as the incident wave energy increases, the amplification of the scattered waves, as well as the energy extraction efficiency from the black hole, is reduced. During the interaction the apparent horizon geometry undergoes sizable nonaxisymmetric oscillations. The largest amplitude excitations occur when the peak frequency of the incident wave packet is above where superradiance occurs, but close to the dominant quasinormal mode frequency of the black hole.

Quantum near-horizon geometry of a black 0-brane

We investigate a bunch of D0-branes to reveal its quantum nature from the gravity side. In the classical limit, it is well described by a non-extremal black 0-brane in type IIA supergravity. The solution is uplifted to the eleven dimensions and expressed by a non-extremal M-wave solution. After reviewing the effective action for the M-theory, we explicitly solve the equations of motion for the near horizon geometry of the M-wave. As a result we derive an unique solution which includes the effect of the quantum gravity. Thermodynamic property of the quantum near horizon geometry of the black 0-brane is also studied by using Wald's formula. Combining our result with that of the Monte Carlo simulation of the dual thermal gauge theory, we find strong evidence for the gauge/gravity duality in the D0-branes system at the level of quantum gravity.

BPS black hole horizons in N=2 gauged supergravity

We study static BPS black hole horizons in four dimensional N=2 gauged supergravity coupled to $n_v$-vector multiplets and with an arbitrary cubic prepotential. We work in a symplectically covariant formalism which allows for both electric and magnetic gauging parameters as well as dyonic background charges and obtain the general solution to the BPS equations for horizons of the form $AdS_2\times \Sigma_g$. In particular this means we solve for the scalar fields as well as the metric of these black holes as a function of the gauging parameters and background charges. When the special Kahler manifold is a symmetric space, our solution is completely explicit and the entropy is related to the familiar quartic invariant. For more general models our solution is implicit up to a set of holomorphic quadratic equations. For particular models which have known embeddings in M-theory, we derive new horizon geometries with dyonic charges and numerically construct black hole solutions. These correspond to M2-branes wrapped on a Riemann surface in a local Calabi-Yau five-fold with internal spin.

Modular discretization of the AdS2/CFT1 holography

We propose a finite discretization for the black hole geometry and dynamics. We realize our proposal, in the case of extremal black holes, for which the radial and temporal near horizon geometry is known to be AdS$_2=SL(2,\mathbb{R})/SO(1,1,\mathbb{R})$. We implement its discretization by replacing the set of real numbers $\mathbb{R}$ with the set of integers modulo $N$, with AdS$_2$ going over to the finite geometry AdS$_2[N]=SL(2,\mathbb{Z}_N)/SO(1,1,\mathbb{Z}_N)$. We model the dynamics of the microscopic degrees of freedom by generalized Arnol'd cat maps, ${\sf A}\in SL(2,\mathbb{Z}_N)$, which are isometries of the geometry at both the classical and quantum levels. These exhibit well studied properties of strong arithmetic chaos, dynamical entropy, nonlocality and factorization in the cutoff discretization $N$, which are crucial for fast quantum information processing. We construct, finally, a new kind of unitary and holographic correspondence, for AdS$_2[N]$/CFT$_1[N]$, via coherent states of both the bulk and boundary geometries.

Holographic vorticity in the fluid/gravity correspondence

The vorticity statistics characterises both the direct and the inverse turbulent cascades of two-dimensional fluid flows. The fluid/gravity correspondence relates fluid flows to black brane dynamics. We construct the holographic vorticity for relativistic and non-relativistic fluids in terms of the gravitational black brane data, and relate it to the horizon vorticity expressed as a Weyl scalar. We discuss the statistical scaling structure of the horizon geometry.

Black hole entanglement and quantum error correction

It was recently argued by Almheiri et al that black hole complementarity strains the basic rules of quantum information theory, such as monogamy of entanglement. Motivated by this argument, we develop a practical framework for describing black hole evaporation via unitary time evolution, based on a holographic perspective in which all black hole degrees of freedom live on the stretched horizon. We model the horizon as a unitary quantum system with finite entropy, and do not postulate that the horizon geometry is smooth. We then show that, with mild assumptions, one can reconstruct local effective field theory observables that probe the black hole interior, and relative to which the state near the horizon looks like a local Minkowski vacuum. The reconstruction makes use of the formalism of quantum error correcting codes, and works for black hole states whose entanglement entropy does not yet saturate the Bekenstein-Hawking bound. Our general framework clarifies the black hole final state proposal, and allows a quantitative study of the transition into the "firewall" regime of maximally mixed black hole states.

Dual 2d CFT identification of extremal black rings from holes

Five dimensional Einstein gravity vacuum solutions in general fall into two classes of black rings with horizon topology S^2 \times S^1, and black holes with horizon topology S^3. These solutions are specified by their mass and two spins. There are "overlapping" regions of this parameter space where one has extremal rings and holes of the same spins. We show that for such regions the hole has generically a larger entropy than the ring, and likewise, the central charge of the proposed chiral 2d CFT dual to the hole is larger than that of the ring. For special places of this overlapping region where one of the spins tends to zero, the entropies of the extremal ring and hole also tend to zero and essentially become equal. In this case we are dealing with Extremal Vanishing Horizon (EVH) black holes or rings. The near horizon geometry of the near-EVH hole and rings both contain locally AdS_3 throats, providing a basis for the EVH/CFT proposal, a 2d CFT description of the low energy excitations of EVH hole or ring. We argue how the near-EVH hole and near-EVH ring can be distinguished from this dual 2d CFT viewpoint: The hole is a thermal state with zero temperature in the left sector and finite temperature in the right, while the ring is a generic state in the ground state (of the CFT on the plane) in the left sector and a thermal state in the right. The latter is part of the Hilbert space of the 2d CFT obtained in the Discrete Light Cone Quantization (DLCQ).

Semiclassical strings on curved branes

We study semiclassical strings in the near horizon geometry of certain curved branes. We investigate the rigidly rotating strings in the near horizon geometry of NS5-branes wrapped on AdS3 x S3 and in the presence of background NS-NS flux. We study several string solutions corresponding to giant magnon, single spike and more general folded strings for the fundamental string in this background. We comment that in the S-dual background the situation changes drastically.

Shape of rotating black holes

We give a thorough description of the shape of rotating axisymmetric stable black-hole (apparent) horizons applicable in dynamical or stationary regimes. It is found that rotation manifests in the widening of their central regions (rotational thickening), limits their global shapes to the extent that stable holes of a given area A and angular momentum J (non zero) form a precompact family (rotational stabilization) and enforces their whole geometry to be close to the extreme-Kerr horizon geometry at almost maximal rotational speed (enforced shaping). The results, which are based on the stability inequality, depend only on A and J. In particular they are entirely independent of the surrounding geometry of the space-time and of the presence of matter satisfying the strong energy condition. A complete set of relations between A, J, the length L of the meridians and the length R of the greatest axisymmetric circle, is given. We also provide concrete estimations for the distance between the geometry of horizons and that of the extreme Kerr, in terms only of A and J. Besides it own interest, the work has applications to the Hoop conjecture as formulated by Gibbons in terms of the Birkhoff invariant, to the Bekenstein-Hod entropy bounds and to study the compactness of classes of stationary black-hole space-times.

SOME ASPECTS OF SPHERICAL SYMMETRIC EXTREMAL DYONIC BLACK HOLES IN 4D N = 1 SUPERGRAVITY

In this paper, we study several aspects of extremal spherical symmetric black hole solutions of four-dimensional N = 1 supergravity coupled to vector and chiral multiplets with the scalar potential turned on. In the asymptotic region, the complex scalars are fixed and regular which can be viewed as the critical points of the black hole and the scalar potentials with vanishing scalar charges. It follows that the asymptotic geometries are of a constant and nonzero scalar curvature which are generally not Einstein. These spaces could also correspond to the near horizon geometries which are the product spaces of a two anti-de Sitter surface and the two sphere if the value of the scalars in both regions coincide. In addition, we prove the local existence of nontrivial radius dependent complex scalar fields which interpolate between the horizon and the asymptotic region. We finally give some simple ℂn-models with both linear superpotential and gauge couplings.

Spectral geometry of cosmological and event horizons for Kerr-Newman-de Sitter metrics

We study the Laplace spectra of the intrinsic instantaneous metrics on the event and cosmological horizons of a Kerr-Newman-de Sitter space-time and prove that the spectral data from these horizons uniquely determine the metric among all such space-times. This is accomplished by exhibiting formulae relating the parameters of the space-time metric to the traces of invariant and equivariant Green’s operators associated with these Laplacians. In particular, an interesting explicit formula for the cosmological constant is found.

A note on the stringy embeddings of certain N=2 dualities

Seiberg–Witten theory can be embedded in F-theory using D3 branes probing an orientifold geometry. The nonperturbative corrections in the orientifold picture map directly to the instanton corrections in the corresponding gauge theory that convert the classical moduli space to the quantum one. In this short review we argue that the recently proposed class of conformal Gaiotto models may also be embedded in F-theory. The F-theory constructions help us not only to understand the Gaiotto dualities but also to extend to the nonconformal cases with and without cascading behaviors. For the conformal cases, the near horizon geometries in F-theory capture both the UV and IR behaviors succinctly.

Conserved quantities and Virasoro algebra in new massive gravity

Using the {\it off-shell} Noether current and potential we compute the entropy for the AdS black holes in new massive gravity. For the non-extremal BTZ black holes by implementing the so-called stretched horizon approach we reproduce the correct expression for the horizon entropy. For the extremal case, we adopt standard formalism in the AdS/CFT correspondence and reproduce the corresponding entropy by computing the central extension term on the asymptotic boundary of the near horizon geometry. We explicitly show the invariance of the angular momentum along the radial direction for extremal as well as non-extremal BTZ black holes in our model. Furthermore, we extend this invariance for the black holes in new massive gravity coupled with a scalar field, which correspond to the holographic renormalization group flow trajectory of the dual field theory. This provides another realization for the holographic c-theorem.

SOLUTIONS AND THERMODYNAMICS OF NONCOMMUTATIVE LIOUVILLE BLACK HOLE

Motivated by string theory results, we study Liouville black hole solutions and their thermodynamics on noncommutative space. In particular, we present explicit solutions of black hole equations of motion, then we find their classical properties such as the ADM-mass, the horizon geometry and the scalar Ricci curvature. Thermodynamic properties of such noncommutative black hole solutions including the Hawking temperature and entropy function are also discussed for three different regions of the moduli space of the theory.

Non-Existence of Toroidal Cohomogeneity-1 Near-Horizon Geometries

We prove that $D\geq 5$ dimensional stationary, non-static near horizon geometries with (D-3) rotational symmetries subject to the vacuum Einstein equations including a cosmological constant cannot have toroidal horizon topology. In D=4 dimensions the same result is obtained under the assumption of a non-negative cosmological constant.

Near-extremal vanishing horizon AdS5 black holes and their CFT duals

We consider families of charged rotating asymptotically AdS5 Extremal black holes with Vanishing Horizon (EVH black holes) whose near horizon geometries develop locally AdS3 throats. Using the AdS3/CFT2 duality, we propose an EVH/CFT2 correspondence to describe the near-horizon low energy IR dynamics of near-EVH black holes involving a specific large N limit of the 4d N = 4 SYM. We give a map between the UV and IR near-EVH excitations, showing that the UV first law of thermodynamics reduces to the IR first law satisfied by the near horizon BTZ black holes in this near-EVH limit. We also discuss the connection between our EVH/CFT proposal and the Kerr/CFT correspondence in the cases where the two overlap.