Standard methods for calculating the black hole entropy beyond general relativity are ambiguous when the horizon is nonstationary. We fix these ambiguities in all quadratic curvature gravity theories, by demanding that the entropy be increasing at every time, for linear perturbations to a stationary black hole. Our result matches with the entropy formula found previously in holographic entanglement entropy calculations. We explicitly calculate the entropy increase for Vaidya-like solutions in Ricci-tensor gravity to show that (unlike the Wald entropy) the holographic entropy obeys a Second Law.

We prove the non existence of massive scalar, vector and tensor hairs outside the surface of a static and stationary compact reflecting star. Our result is the extension of the no hair theorem for black holes to horizonless compact configurations with reflecting boundary condition at the surface. We also generalize the proof for spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant. * srijitb@iiita.ac.in † sudiptas@iitgn.ac.in

Cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena can produce impulsive gravitational waves that can possibly be detected by the advanced versions of present-day detectors in the future. Gluing of two spacetimes across a null surface produces impulsive gravitational waves (in the phraseology of Penrose [1]) having a Dirac Delta function type pulse profile along the surface. It is known that BMS-like symmetries appear as soldering freedom while we glue two spacetimes along a null surface. In this note, we study the effect of such impulsive gravitational waves on test particles (detectors) or geodesics. We show explicitly some measurable effects that depend on BMS-transformation parameters on timelike and null geodesics. BMS-like symmetry parameters carried by the gravitational wave leave some "memory" on test geodesics upon passing through them.

When two spacetimes are stitched across a null shell placed at the horizon of a black hole, Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) supertranslation-like soldering freedom arises if one demands the induced metric on the shell should remain invariant under the translations generated by the null generators of the shell. We revisit this phenomenon on the horizon of rotating shells and obtain BMS-like symmetries. We further show that superrotation-like soldering symmetries in the form of conformal isometries can emerge whenever the degenerate metric of any null hypersurface admits a dependency on a null (degenerate direction) coordinate. This kind of conformal isometry can also appear for a null surface situated very close to the horizon of black holes. We also study the intrinsic properties of different kinds of horizon shells considered in this article.

When an electrically charged black hole is perturbed its inner horizon becomes a singularity, often referred to as the Poisson-Israel mass inflation singularity. Ori constructed a model of this phenomenon for asymptotically flat black holes, in which the metric can be determined explicitly in the mass inflation region. In this paper we implement the Ori model for charged AdS black holes. We find that the mass function inflates faster than the flat space case as the inner horizon is approached. Nevertheless, the mass inflation singularity is still a weak singularity: although spacetime curvature becomes infinite, tidal distortions remain finite on physical objects attempting to cross it.