Lattice Black Branes: Sphere Packing in General Relativity

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes inhomogeneous black branes in higher-dimensional spacetime, showing some are thermodynamically favored and have stable endpoints, unlike simpler black string models.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative method to construct inhomogeneous black branes with multiple directions and demonstrates their thermodynamic stability.

Findings

Some inhomogeneous black branes are thermodynamically preferred.

Certain unstable black branes have stable endpoints without cosmic censorship violation.

The work extends understanding of black brane stability in higher dimensions.

Abstract

We perturbatively construct asymptotically $\mathbb{R}^{1,3}\times\mathbb{T}^2$ black branes with multiple inhomogeneous directions and show that some of them are thermodynamically preferred over uniform branes in both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. This demonstrates that, unlike five-dimensional black strings, the instability of some unstable black branes has a plausible endpoint that does not require a violation of cosmic censorship.