Conveners
M3-4 Black Holes (DTP) / Trous noirs (DPT)
- Masoud Ghezelbash (University of saskatchewan)
In numerical relativity, marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) (often referred to as apparent horizons) are the main tool to locate and characterize black holes. For five decades it has been known that during a binary merger, the initial apparent horizons of the individual holes disappear inside a new joint MOTS that forms around them once they are sufficiently close together. However the...
The common picture of a binary black hole merger is the “pair of pants” diagram for the event horizon. However, in many circumstances, such as those encountered in numerical simulations, the event horizon may be ill-suited and it is more practical to work with quasi-local definitions of black hole boundaries, such as marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS). The analog of the pair of pants...
In the case of binary black hole mergers, the surface of most obvious interest, the Event Horizon, is often computationally difficult to locate. Instead, it is useful to turn to quasi-local characterizations of black hole boundaries, such as Marginally Outer Trapped Surfaces (MOTS), which are defined for a single time slice of the spacetime, and the outer-most of which is the apparent...
Despite the constant stream of black hole merger observations, black hole mergers are not yet fully understood. The phenomenon seems simple enough, but the details of how the two apparent horizons end up as one horizon is unclear due to the non-linear nature of the merger process. Recent numerical work has shown that there is a merger of self-intersecting Marginally Outer-Trapped Surfaces...
The observation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of mass over a billion solar masses within the first billion years after the Big Bang challenges standard models of the growth of massive objects. Direct collapse black holes arising from a short-lived supermassive star phase have been proposed as a means to form the SMBHs in the required time. In this work we show that a weak cosmological...
One of the more exciting things to emerge from black hole thermodynamics in the past 10 years is the understanding that black holes can undergo a broad range of chemical-like phase transitions, including liquid-gas phase transitions, triple points, superfluid transitions, polymer-type transitions, and exhibit critical behaviour. It is even possible to consider black holes as the working...
One of the more exciting things to emerge from black hole thermodynamics is that black holes can form the working material for heat engines. I explore the connection between the critical behaviour of black holes and their efficiency as heat engines over a range of dimensions and for a variety of theories of gravity.
I first show that their efficiency as heat engines near the critical point...
We examine the thermodynamics of a new class of asymptotically AdS black holes with non-constant curvature event horizons in Gauss-Bonnet Lovelock gravity, with the cosmological constant acting as thermodynamic pressure. We find that non-trivial curvature on the horizon can significantly affect their thermodynamic behaviour. We observe novel triple points in 6 dimensions between large and...
Additional spatial dimensions compactified to submillimeter scales serves as an elegant solution to the hierarchy problem. As a consequence of the extra-dimensional theory, primordial black holes can be created by high-energy particle interactions in the early universe. While four-dimensional primordial black holes have been extensively studied, they have received little attention in the...
