Hidden Structures of Black Holes

Abstract

This thesis investigates two main topics concerning black holes in extensions of general relativity inspired by string theory. First, the structure of the equations of motion underlying black hole solutions is considered, in theories of D-dimensional gravity coupled to scalars and vectors. For solutions preserving supersymmetry, the equations of motion have a dramatic simplification: they become first-order instead of the second-order equations one would expect. Recently, it was found that this is a feature some non-supersymmetric black hole solutions exhibit as well. We investigate if this holds more generally, by examining what the conditions are to have first-order equations for the scalar fields of non-supersymmetric black holes, that mimic the form of their supersymmetric counterparts. This is illustrated in examples. Second, the structure of black holes themselves is investigated. String theory has been successful in explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for (mainly supersymmetric) black holes from a microscopic perspective. However, it is not fully established what the interpretation of the corresponding 'microstates' should be in the gravitational description where the black hole picture is valid. There have been recent advances to understand the nature of black hole microstates in the gravity regime, such as the fuzzball proposal. A related idea says that black hole configurations with multiple centers are related to microstates of single-centered black holes. We report on work relating both pictures. As an aside, a relation between violations of causality for certain spacetimes (presence of closed timelike curves in the geometry) and a breakdown of unitarity in the dual conformal field theory is given.