The grand challenges of contemporary fundamental physics—dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy, inflation and early universe cosmology, singularities and the hierarchy problem—all involve gravity as a key component. And of all gravitational phenomena, black holes stand out in their elegant simplicity, while harbouring some of the most remarkable predictions of General Relativity: event horizons, singularities and ergoregions. The hitherto invisible landscape of the gravitational Universe is being unveiled before our eyes: the historical direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration marks the dawn of a new era of scientific exploration. Gravitational-wave astronomy will allow us to test models of black hole formation, growth and evolution, as well as models of gravitational-wave generation and propagation. It will provide evidence for event horizons and ergoregions, test the theory of General Relativity itself, and may reveal the existence of new fundamental fields. The synthesis of these results has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of Nature. The purpose of this work is to present a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the relevant fields of research, summarize important open problems, and lay out a roadmap for future progress. This write-up is an initiative taken within the framework of the European Action on ‘Black holes, Gravitational waves and Fundamental Physics’.

A black hole solution of Einstein's field equations with cylindrical symmetry is found. Using the Hamiltonian formulation one is able to define mass and angular momentum for the cylindrical black hole through the corresponding and equivalent three dimensional theory. The causal structure is analyzed.

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The thermodynamical properties of the Reissner-Nordström-anti-de Sitter black hole in the grand canonical ensemble are investigated using York's formalism. The black hole is enclosed in a cavity with finite radius where the temperature and electrostatic potential are fixed. The boundary conditions allow one to compute the relevant thermodynamical quantities, e.g. thermal energy, entropy and charge. The stability conditions imply that there are thermodynamically stable black hole solutions, under certain conditions. By taking the boundary to infinity, and leaving the event horizon and charge of the black hole fixed, one rederives the Hawking-Page action and Hawking-Page specific heat. Instantons with negative heat capacity are also found.

Following the work of Kinnersley and Walker for flat spacetimes, we have analyzed the anti-de Sitter C-metric in a previous paper. In the de Sitter case, Podolský and Griffiths have established that the de Sitter C-metric (dS C-metric) found by Plebański and Demiański describes a pair of accelerated black holes in the dS background with the acceleration being provided (in addition to the cosmological constant) by a strut that pushes away the two black holes or, alternatively, by a string that pulls them. We extend their analysis mainly in four directions. First, we draw the Carter-Penrose diagrams of the massless uncharged dS C-metric, of the massive uncharged dS C-metric and of the massive charged dS C-metric. These diagrams allow us to clearly identify the presence of two dS black holes and to conclude that they cannot interact gravitationally. Second, we revisit the embedding of the dS C-metric in the 5D Minkowski spacetime and we represent the motion of the dS C-metric origin in the dS 4-hyperboloid as well as the localization of the strut. Third, we comment on the physical properties of the strut that connects the two black holes. Finally, we find the range of parameters that correspond to non-extreme black holes, extreme black holes, and naked particles.

Black hole quasinormal frequencies are complex numbers that encode information on how a black hole relaxes after it has been perturbed and depend on the features of the geometry and on the type of perturbations. On the one hand, the examples studied so far in the literature focused on the case of black hole geometries with singularities in their interior. On the other hand, it is expected that quantum or classical modifications of general relativity may correct the pathological singular behavior of classical black hole solutions. Despite the fact that we do not have at hand a complete theory of quantum gravity, regular black hole solutions can be constructed by coupling gravity to an external form of matter, sometimes modeled by one form or another of nonlinear electrodynamics. It is therefore relevant to compute quasinormal frequencies for these regular solutions and see how differently, from the ordinary ones, regular black holes ring. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and, by computing the quasinormal frequencies, study the quasinormal modes of neutral and charged scalar field perturbations on regular black hole backgrounds in a variety of models.

Abstract:We obtain the magnetic counterpart of the BTZ solution, i.e., the rotating spacetime of a point source generating a magnetic field in three dimensional Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. The static (non-rotating) magnetic solution was found by Clément, by Hirschmann and Welch and by Cataldo and Salgado. This paper is an extension of their work in order to include (i) angular momentum, (ii) the definition of conserved quantities (this is possible since spacetime is asymptotically anti-de Sitter), (iii) upper bounds for the conserved quantities themselves, and (iv) a new interpretation for the magnetic field source. We show that both the static and rotating magnetic solutions have negative mass and that there is an upper bound for the intensity of the magnetic field source and for the value of the angular momentum. The magnetic field source can be interpreted not as a vortex but as being composed by a system of two symmetric and superposed electric charges, one of the electric charges is at rest and the other is spinning. The rotating magnetic solution reduces to the rotating uncharged BTZ solution when the magnetic field source vanishes.