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It has recently been shown that BMS supertranslation symmetries imply an infinite number of conservation laws for all gravitational theories in asymptotically Minkowskian spacetimes. These laws require black holes to carry a large amount of soft (i.e. zeroenergy) supertranslation hair. The presence of a Maxwell field similarly implies soft electric hair. This paper gives an explicit description of soft hair in terms of soft gravitons or photons on the black hole horizon, and shows that complete information about their quantum state is stored on a holographic plate at the future boundary of the horizon. Charge conservation is used to give an infinite number of exact relations between the evaporation products of black holes which have different soft hair but are otherwise identical. It is further argued that soft hair which is spatially localized to much less than a Planck length cannot be excited in a physically realizable process, giving an effective number of soft degrees of freedom proportional to the horizon area in Planck units.

We obtain expressions for the mass and angular momenta of rotating black holes in anti-de Sitter backgrounds in four, five and higher dimensions. We verify explicitly that our expressions satisfy the first law of thermodynamics, thus allowing an unambiguous identification of the entropy of these black holes with 1 4 of the area. We find that the associated thermodynamic potential equals the background-subtracted Euclidean action multiplied by the temperature. Our expressions differ from many given in the literature. We find that in more than four dimensions, only our expressions satisfy the first law of thermodynamics.Moreover, in all dimensions we show that our expression for the mass coincides with that given by the conformal conserved charge introduced by Ashtekar, Magnon and Das. We indicate the relevance of these results to the AdS/CFT correspondence. ‡ Research supported in part by DOE grant DE-FG03-95ER40917.