Higher-Curvature Gravity, Black Holes and Holography

Abstract

Recently, the identification of new higher-curvature interactions known as Einsteinian cubic gravity (ECG) and Generalized quasi-topological gravities (GQGs) has allowed for important advances in the study of black hole solutions and holographic applications of higher-order gravity. These theories are characterized by having second-order linearized equations on maximally symmetric background and by possessing static, spherically symmetric (SSS) black hole solutions satisfying $g_{tt}g_{rr}=-1$, and whose thermodynamic properties can be studied analytically in a fully non-perturbative fashion. In the first part of this thesis, we perform a detailed analysis of the weak-field limit of $\mathcal{L}($Riemann$)$ theories and of the condition $g_{tt}g_{rr}=-1$ on SSS solutions, and we review the construction of ECG and Generalized quasi-topological gravities. In addition, we show that GQGs could serve as building blocks to construct the most general EFT for gravity. In the second part we study the non-perturbative corrections to the asymptotically flat Schwarzschild black hole in $D=4$. We obtain closed exact expressions for the thermodynamic properties of spherically symmetric black holes with an arbitrary number of higher-curvature terms. We find that, quite generally, the higher-curvature corrections make the specific heat of these black holes positive below certain mass, and hence black holes take an infinite time to evaporate and the final "Hawking explosion" is avoided. In the last part we study asymptotically AdS black holes and Euclidean-AdS-Taub-NUT solutions and we establish various entries of the holographic dictionary of $D=4$ ECG. We illustrate the power of holographic higher-order gravities by obtaining a relation for the free energy of CFTs on squashed spheres, which we conjecture to be valid for arbitrary CFTs.