Black holes on thick branes

TL;DR

This paper investigates black holes on thick branes, providing a smooth solution for black holes bound to domain walls, exploring flux expulsion phenomena, and analyzing black hole nucleation processes on branes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to smooth singular black hole solutions on thick branes and studies black hole interactions and nucleation on domain walls.

Findings

Charged extremal black holes expel the brane wall.

A smooth thick brane solution for black holes is constructed.

Black hole nucleation on the wall is more probable than away from it.

Abstract

The interplay between topological defects (branes) and black holes has been a subject of recent study, motivated in part by interest in brane-world scenarios. In this paper we analyze in detail the description of a black hole bound to a domain wall (a two-brane in four dimensions), for which an exact description in the limit of zero wall thickness has been given recently. We show how to smooth this singular solution with a thick domain wall. We also show that charged extremal black holes of a size (roughly) smaller than the brane thickness expel the wall, thereby extending the phenomenon of flux expulsion. Finally, we analyze the process of black hole nucleation {\it on} a domain wall, and argue that it is preferred over a previously studied mechanism of black hole nucleation {\it away} from the wall.