The Lovelock Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper introduces black hole solutions in Lovelock gravity, exploring their properties and recent developments, including generalizations of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet solutions, topological black holes, wormholes, and naked singularities.

Contribution

It provides an overview of Lovelock black hole solutions, analyzing their key features and recent progress in understanding their diverse geometries and physical implications.

Findings

Generalization of Boulware-Deser solutions

Analysis of topological black holes and black branes

Discussion of vacuum wormhole geometries and naked singularities

Abstract

Lovelock theory is a natural extension of Einstein theory of gravity to higher dimensions, and it is of great interest in theoretical physics as it describes a wide class of models. In particular, it describes string theory inspired ultraviolet corrections to Einstein-Hilbert action, while admits the Einstein general relativiy and the so called Chern-Simons theories of gravity as particular cases. Recently, five-dimensional Lovelock theory has been considered in the literature as a working example to illustrate the effects of including higher-curvature terms in the context of AdS/CFT correspondence. Here, we give an introduction to the black hole solutions of Lovelock theory and analyze their most important properties. These solutions can be regarded as generalizations of the Boulware-Deser solution of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, which we discuss in detail here. We briefly discuss some recent progress in understading these and other solutions, like topological black holes that represent black branes of the theory, and vacuum thin-shell wormhole-like geometries that connect two different asymptotically de-Sitter spaces. We also make some comments on solutions with time-like naked singularities.