The concept of an extremal black hole is theoretical and none have thusfar been observed in nature. However, many theories are based on their existence.
It has been suggested by Sean Carroll that the entropy of an extremal black hole is equal to zero. Carroll explains the lack of entropy by creating a separate dimension for the black hole to exist within.[3]
The Hawking radiation of extremal black holes is considered non-thermal (non-Planck distributed), with no associated temperature.[4]
The hypothetical black hole electron is super-extremal (having more charge and angular momentum than a black hole of its mass "should").
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light and other electromagnetic waves, is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.
Hawking radiation is the theoretical thermal black-body radiation released outside a black hole's event horizon. This is counterintuitive because once ordinary electromagnetic radiation is inside the event horizon, it cannot escape. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who developed a theoretical argument for its existence in 1974. Hawking radiation is predicted to be extremely faint and is many orders of magnitude below the current best telescopes' detecting ability.
The no-hair theorem states that all stationary black hole solutions of the Einstein–Maxwell equations of gravitation and electromagnetism in general relativity can be completely characterized by only three independent externally observable classical parameters: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. Other characteristics are uniquely determined by these three parameters, and all other information about the matter that formed a black hole or is falling into it "disappears" behind the black-hole event horizon and is therefore permanently inaccessible to external observers after the black hole "settles down". Physicist John Archibald Wheeler expressed this idea with the phrase "black holes have no hair", which was the origin of the name.
In physics, black hole thermodynamics is the area of study that seeks to reconcile the laws of thermodynamics with the existence of black hole event horizons. As the study of the statistical mechanics of black-body radiation led to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics, the effort to understand the statistical mechanics of black holes has had a deep impact upon the understanding of quantum gravity, leading to the formulation of the holographic principle.
A gravastar is an object hypothesized in astrophysics by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola as an alternative to the black hole theory. It has usual black hole metric outside of the horizon, but de Sitter metric inside. On the horizon there is a thin shell of matter. The term "gravastar" is a portmanteau of the words "gravitational vacuum star". Further theoretical considerations of gravastars include the notion of a nestar.
Jacob David Bekenstein was a Mexican-born American-Israeli theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
The Immirzi parameter is a numerical coefficient appearing in loop quantum gravity (LQG), a nonperturbative theory of quantum gravity. The Immirzi parameter measures the size of the quantum of area in Planck units. As a result, its value is currently fixed by matching the semiclassical black hole entropy, as calculated by Stephen Hawking, and the counting of microstates in loop quantum gravity.
Micro black holes, also called mini black holes or quantum mechanical black holes, are hypothetical tiny black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role. The concept that black holes may exist that are smaller than stellar mass was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Hawking.
The black hole information paradox is a paradox that appears when the predictions of quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of black holes that are regions of spacetime from which nothing—not even light—can escape. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking applied the semiclassical approach of quantum field theory in curved spacetime to such systems and found that an isolated black hole would emit a form of radiation. He also argued that the detailed form of the radiation would be independent of the initial state of the black hole, and depend only on its mass, electric charge and angular momentum.
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory in curved spacetime (QFTCS) is an extension of quantum field theory from Minkowski spacetime to a general curved spacetime. This theory uses a semi-classical approach; it treats spacetime as a fixed, classical background, while giving a quantum-mechanical description of the matter and energy propagating through that spacetime. A general prediction of this theory is that particles can be created by time-dependent gravitational fields (multigraviton pair production), or by time-independent gravitational fields that contain horizons. The most famous example of the latter is the phenomenon of Hawking radiation emitted by black holes.
Higher-dimensional Einstein gravity is any of various physical theories that attempt to generalise to higher dimensions various results of the well established theory of standard (four-dimensional) Albert Einstein's gravitational theory, that is, general relativity. This attempt at generalisation has been strongly influenced in recent decades by string theory.
A ring singularity or ringularity is the gravitational singularity of a rotating black hole, or a Kerr black hole, that is shaped like a ring.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018, and was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 2023. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 2017–2019, and is Editor-in-Chief of Reports on Progress in Physics 2022-.
The Kerr/CFT correspondence is an extension of the AdS/CFT correspondence or gauge-gravity duality to rotating black holes.
The Bousso bound captures a fundamental relation between quantum information and the geometry of space and time. It appears to be an imprint of a unified theory that combines quantum mechanics with Einstein's general relativity. The study of black hole thermodynamics and the information paradox led to the idea of the holographic principle: the entropy of matter and radiation in a spatial region cannot exceed the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy of the boundary of the region, which is proportional to the boundary area. However, this "spacelike" entropy bound fails in cosmology; for example, it does not hold true in our universe.
In theoretical physics, a dynamical horizon (DH) is a local description of evolving black-hole horizons. In the literature there exist two different mathematical formulations of DHs—the 2+2 formulation developed first by Sean Hayward and the 3+1 formulation developed by Abhay Ashtekar and others. It provides a description of a black hole that is evolving. A related formalism, for black holes with zero influx, is an isolated horizon.
A black hole firewall is a hypothetical phenomenon where an observer falling into a black hole encounters high-energy quanta at the event horizon. The "firewall" phenomenon was proposed in 2012 by physicists Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully as a possible solution to an apparent inconsistency in black hole complementarity. The proposal is sometimes referred to as the AMPS firewall, an acronym for the names of the authors of the 2012 paper. The potential inconsistency pointed out by AMPS had been pointed out earlier by Samir Mathur who used the argument in favour of the fuzzball proposal. The use of a firewall to resolve this inconsistency remains controversial, with physicists divided as to the solution to the paradox.
Samir Dayal Mathur is a theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory and black hole physics.
Atish Dabholkar is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is currently the Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section, and also Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies" (LPTHE).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
