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The isolated horizon formalism recently introduced by Ashtekar et al. aims at providing a quasi-local concept of a black hole in equilibrium in an otherwise possibly dynamical spacetime. In this formalism, a hierarchy of geometrical structures is constructed on a null hypersurface. On the other side, the 3+1 formulation of general relativity provides a powerful setting for studying the spacetime dynamics, in particular gravitational radiation from black hole systems. Here we revisit the kinematics and dynamics of null hypersurfaces by making use of some 3+1 slicing of spacetime. In particular, the additional structures induced on null hypersurfaces by the 3+1 slicing permit a natural extension to the full spacetime of geometrical quantities defined on the null hypersurface. This 4-dimensional point of view facilitates the link between the null and spatial geometries. We proceed by reformulating the isolated horizon structure in this framework. We also reformulate previous works, such as Damour's black hole mechanics, and make the link with a previous 3+1 approach of black hole horizon, namely the membrane paradigm. We explicit all geometrical objects in terms of 3+1 quantities, putting a special emphasis on the conformal 3+1 formulation. This is in particular relevant for the initial data problem of black hole spacetimes for numerical relativity. Illustrative examples are provided by considering various slicings of Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes.Comment: numerous corrections, references added, 224 pages, 21 figures, Physics Reports, in pres

An analytical scheme and a numerical method in order to study the effects of general relativity on the viscosity driven secular bar mode instability of rapidly rotating stars are presented. The approach consists in perturbing an axisymmetric and stationary configuration and studying its evolution by constructing a series of triaxial quasi-equilibrium configurations. These are obtained by solution of an approximate set of field equations where only the dominant non-axisymmetric terms are taken into account. The progress with respect to our former investigation consists in a higher relativistic order of the non-axisymmetric terms included into the computation, namely the fully three-dimensional treatment of the vector part of the space-time metric tensor as opposed to the scalar part, solely, in the former case. The scheme is applied to rotating stars built on a polytropic equation of state and compared to our previous results. The 3D-vector part turns out to inhibit the symmetry breaking efficiently. Nevertheless, the bar mode instability is still possible for an astrophysically relevant mass of M ns = 1.4 M ⊙ when a stiff polytropic equation of state with an adiabatic index of γ = 2.5 is employed. Triaxial neutron stars may be efficient emitters of gravitational waves and are thus potentially interesting sources for the forthcoming laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO, VIRGO and GEO600. From a numerical point of view, the solution of the three-dimensional minimal-distortion shift vector equation in spherical coordinates is an important achievement of our code.