We clarify the relation between gravitational entropy and the area of horizons. We first show that the entropy of an extreme Reissner-Nordström black hole is zero, despite the fact that its horizon has nonzero area. Next, we consider the pair creation of extremal and nonextremal black holes. It is shown that the action which governs the rate of this pair creation is directly related to the area of the acceleration horizon and (in the nonextremal case) the area of the black hole event horizon. This provides a simple explanation of the result that the rate of pair creation of non-extreme black holes is enhanced by precisely the black hole entropy. Finally, we discuss black hole annihilation, and argue that Planck scale remnants are not sufficient to preserve unitarity in quantum gravity.

We embed a holographic description of a quantum field theory with Galilean conformal invariance in string theory. The key observation is that such field theories may be realized as conventional superconformal field theories with a known string theory embedding, twisted by the R-symmetry in a light-like direction. Using the Null Melvin Twist, we construct the appropriate dual geometry and its non-extremal generalization. From the nonzero temperature solution we determine the equation of state. We also discuss the hydrodynamic regime of these non-relativistic plasmas and show that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio takes the universal value η/s = 1/4π typical of strongly interacting field theories with gravity duals. There are twists of the R-symmetry that preserve as many as 8 supercharges [23]. We use a simple twist which does not preserve any supersymmetry because of the resulting form of the H (3) flux. 4 We would like to thank Allan Adams for mentioning this DLCQ interpretation in informal discussion.

Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We construct smooth nonsupersymmetric soliton solutions with D1-brane, D5-brane, and momentum charges in type IIB supergravity compactified on T 4 S 1 , with the charges along the compact directions. This generalizes previous studies of smooth supersymmetric solutions. The solutions are obtained by considering a known family of U1 U1 invariant metrics, and studying the conditions imposed by requiring smoothness. We discuss the relation of our solutions to states in the CFT describing the D1-D5 system and describe various interesting features of the geometry.

. (2001) Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO• the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Conical defects, or point particles, in AdS 3 are one of the simplest nontrivial gravitating systems, and are particularly interesting because black holes can form from their collision. We embed the BPS conical defects of three dimensions into the Nϭ4b supergravity in six dimensions, which arises from the IIB string theory compactified on K3. The required Kaluza-Klein reduction of the six dimensional theory on a sphere is analyzed in detail, including the relation to the Chern-Simons supergravities in three dimensions. We show that the six dimensional spaces obtained by embedding the 3D conical defects arise in the near-horizon limit of rotating black strings. Various properties of these solutions are analyzed and we propose a representation of our defects in the CFT dual to asymptotically AdS 3 ϫS 3 spaces. Our work is intended as a first step towards analyzing colliding defects that form black holes.

In anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, classical supergravity solutions are represented "holographically" by conformal field theory (CFT) states in which operators have expectation values. These 1-point functions are directly related to the asymptotic behaviour of bulk fields. In some cases, distinct supergravity solutions have identical asymptotic behaviour; so dual expectation values are insufficient to distinguish them. We argue that non-local objects in the gauge theory can resolve the ambiguity, and explicitly show that collections of point particles in AdS 3 can be detected by studying kinks in dual CFT Green functions. Three dimensional black holes can be formed by collision of such particles. We show how black hole formation can be detected in the holographic dual, and calculate CFT quantities that are sensitive to the distribution of matter inside the event horizon.

We discuss the calculation of the field theory stress tensor from the dual geometry for two recent proposals for gravity duals of non-relativistic conformal field theories. The first of these has a Schrödinger symmetry including Galilean boosts, while the second has just an anisotropic scale invariance (the Lifshitz case). For the Lifshitz case, we construct an appropriate action principle. We propose a definition of the non-relativistic stress tensor complex for the field theory as an appropriate variation of the action in both cases. In the Schrödinger case, we show that this gives physically reasonable results for a simple black hole solution and agrees with an earlier proposal to determine the stress tensor from the familiar AdS prescription. In the Lifshitz case, we solve the linearised equations of motion for a general perturbation around the background, showing that our stress tensor is finite on-shell. * S.F. Ross@durham.ac.uk

A number of attempts have recently been made to extend the conjectured S duality of Yang Mills theory to gravity. Central to these speculations has been the belief that electrically and magnetically charged black holes, the solitons of quantum gravity, have identical quantum properties. This is not obvious, because although duality is a symmetry of the classical equations of motion, it changes the sign of the Maxwell action. Nevertheless, we show that the chemical potential and charge projection that one has to introduce for electric but not magnetic black holes exactly compensate for the difference in action in the semi-classical approximation. In particular, we show that the pair production of electric black holes is not a runaway process, as one might think if one just went by the action of the relevant instanton. We also comment on the definition of the entropy in cosmological situations, and show that we need to be more careful when defining the entropy than we are in an asymptotically-flat case.

In AdS, scalar fields with masses slightly above the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound admit a variety of possible boundary conditions which are reflected in the Lagrangian of the dual field theory. Generic small changes in the AdS boundary conditions correspond to deformations of the dual field theory by multi-trace operators. Here we extend this discussion to the case of vector gauge fields in the bulk spacetime using the results of Ishibashi and Wald [hep-th/0402184]. As in the context of scalar fields, general boundary conditions for vector fields involve multi-trace deformations which lead to renormalization-group flows. Such flows originate in ultra-violet CFTs which give new gauge/gravity dualities. At least for AdS 4 /CFT 3 , the dual of the bulk photon appears to be a propagating gauge field instead of the usual R-charge current. Applying similar reasoning to tensor fields suggests the existence of a duality between string theory on AdS 4 and a quantum gravity theory in three dimensions.