The formulation of the laws of black hole mechanics assumes the stability of black holes under perturbations in accordance with the "cosmic censorship hypothesis"(CCH). CCH prohibits the formation of a naked singularity by a physical process from a regular black hole solution with an event horizon. Earlier studies show that naked singularities can indeed be formed leading to the violation of CCH if a near-extremal black hole is injected with massive charged particles and the back reaction effects are neglected. We investigate the validity of CCH by considering the infall of charged massless particles as well as a charged null shell. We also discuss the issue of third law of black hole mechanics in the presence of null charged particles by considering various possibilities. * fairoos.c@iitgn.ac.in † avirup.ghosh@iitgn.ac.in ‡ sudiptas@iitgn.ac.in arXiv:1709.05081v2 [gr-qc]

We examine the problem of overcharging extremal and near-extremal black hole solutions of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in any dimension, generalizing the result in general relativity. We show that as in the case of general relativity, it is not possible to create a naked singularity by overcharging an extremal black hole in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity using a charged test particle. Our result suggests that the validity of the cosmic censorship hypothesis transcends beyond general relativity to well motivated higher curvature gravity.

We study the entropy evolution of black holes in Lovelock gravity by formulating a thermodynamic generalization of null Raychaudhuri equation. We show that the similarity between the expressions of entropy change of the black hole horizon due to perturbation and that of a fluid, which is out of equilibrium, transcends beyond general relativity to the Lovelock class of theories. Exploiting this analogy we find that the shear and bulk viscosities for the black holes in Lovelock theories exactly match with those obtained in the membrane paradigm and also from holographic considerations. * fairoos.c@iitgn.ac.in † avirup.ghosh@iitgn.ac.in ‡ sudiptas@iitgn.ac.in

The purely thermal nature of Hawking radiation from evaporating black holes leads to the information loss paradox. A possible route to its resolution could be if (enough) correlations are shown to be present in the radiation emitted from evaporating black holes. A re-analysis of Hawking's derivation including the effects of self-interactions in GR shows that the emitted radiation does deviate from pure thermality, however no correlations exist between successively emitted Hawking quanta. We extend the calculations to Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity and investigate if higher curvature corrections to the action lead to some new correlations in the Hawking spectra. The effective trajectory of a massless shell is determined by solving the constraint equations and the semiclassical tunneling probability is calculated. As in the case of general relativity, the radiation is no longer thermal but there is no correlation between successive emissions. The absence of any extra correlations in the emitted radiations even in Gauss-Bonnet gravity suggests that the resolution of the paradox is beyond the scope of semi-classical gravity.