Isolated and dynamical horizons and their applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the quasi-local framework of isolated and dynamical horizons, highlighting their properties and applications across quantum gravity, numerical relativity, and black hole thermodynamics, unifying diverse approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, quasi-local framework for analyzing black holes, extending results in black hole physics and providing new tools for various research areas.

Findings

Generalized black hole thermodynamics

Developed techniques for numerical relativity

Proposed models for hairy black holes

Abstract

Over the past three decades, black holes have played an important role in quantum gravity, mathematical physics, numerical relativity and gravitational wave phenomenology. However, conceptual settings and mathematical models used to discuss them have varied considerably from one area to another. Over the last five years a new, quasi-local framework was introduced to analyze diverse facets of black holes in a unified manner. In this framework, evolving black holes are modeled by dynamical horizons and black holes in equilibrium by isolated horizons. We review basic properties of these horizons and summarize applications to mathematical physics, numerical relativity and quantum gravity. This paradigm has led to significant generalizations of several results in black hole physics. Specifically, it has introduced a more physical setting for black hole thermodynamics and for black hole entropy calculations in quantum gravity; suggested a phenomenological model for hairy black holes; provided novel techniques to extract physics from numerical simulations; and led to new laws governing the dynamics of black holes in exact general relativity.