Supersymmetric Gravity And Black Holes

This is the third volume in a series of books on general topics in supersymmetric mechanics. This collection presents material from the well established international and annual INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati Winter School on the Attractor Mechanism.

This book is based upon lectures presented in the summer of 2009 at the INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati School on Attractor Mechanism, directed by Stefano Bellucci. The symposium included such prestigious lecturers as S. Ferrara, G. Dall'Agata, J.F. Morales, J. Simón and M. Trigiante. All lectures were given at a pedagogical, introductory level, which is reflected in the specific "flavor" of this volume. The book also benefits from extensive discussions about, and the related reworking of, the various contributions. It is the fifth volume in a series of books on the general topics of supersymmetry, supergravity, black holes and the attractor mechanism.

In this Thesis, we study black holes and their microscopic properties in extensions of General Relativity that arise as low-energy limits of String Theory. The first question we want to address is how information is released from black holes during evaporation. We make use of quantum information techniques and study information release from qubit systems. We then introduce a general framework to capture the Hawking evaporation process and deduce the constraints unitarity puts on the evolution. This makes the statement of information loss in black hole evaporation more precise and supports the claim that the horizon has to be replaced by a structure, or \emph{fuzzball}, that carries information about the black hole microstates. This immediately raises the question of what this horizon-scale structure is? We address this question in the context of Supergravity. We systematically construct a family of microstates of near-extremal black holes, by placing metastable supertubes inside certain scaling supersymmetric smooth microstate geometries. These non-extremal fuzzballs differ from the classical black hole solution macroscopically at the horizon scale, and for certain probes the fluctuations between various fuzzballs will be visible as thermal noise far away from the horizon. If the black hole horizon is replaced by a horizon-scale structure one can ask what the experience of an observer falling into such a structure is? A recent, much debated, Gedankenexperiment suggests that an infalling observer will burn at a firewall at the horizon. We rephrase this Gedankenexperiment in the decoherence picture of quantum mechanics and ask about the fate of an infalling wave packet. While wave packets of the size of outgoing Hawking quanta can indeed not freely fall through the horizon-scale structure there is a possibility that the experience of macroscopic infalling observers that strongly interact with the structure can have an alternate description of free fall through the horizon of a black hole. We discuss this recently proposed picture of fuzzball complementarity in detail and test it using our newly constructed near-extremal microstates. A key feature of supersymmetric multi-center solutions, used to construct these near-extremal microstates, is that when brane probes are placed in this background in a supersymmetric way they capture the same information as the fully backreacted Supergravity solution. We investigate whether this non-renormalization property also holds for extremal `almost-BPS' solutions where supersymmetry is broken in a controllable way. We find that despite the lack of supersymmetry, the probe action reproduces exactly the equations underlying the fully back-reacted solution indicating that these equations also do not receive quantum corrections.

This is the third volume in a series of books on general topics in supersymmetric mechanics. This collection presents material from the well established international and annual INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati Winter School on the Attractor Mechanism.

This is the sixth volume in a series of books on the general topics of supersymmetry, supergravity, black holes and the attractor mechanism. The present volume is based upon lectures held in May 2011 at the INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati School on Black Objects in Supergravity (BOSS2011), directed by Stefano Bellucci, with the participation of prestigious lecturers, including G. Lopes Cardoso, W. Chemissany, T. Ortin, J. Perz, O. Vaughan, D. Turton, L. Lusanna and S. Ferrara. All lectures were at a pedagogical, introductory level, a feature which is reflected in the specific "flavor" of this volume, which also benefited greatly from extensive discussions and related reworking of the various contributions.

'Includes exciting recent advances in studying gravity and its cosmic manifestations.' Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society A fascinating historical account of how we have reached our current understanding of gravity. There have been sensational developments in gravitational physics in recent years. The detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of space - has opened a new window on the universe. These waves are produced by the most cataclysmic events in the universe - the collisions and mergers of black holes and neutron stars. There have also been great strides in our understanding of supermassive black holes. We now know that a black hole with a gargantuan mass lies at the heart of every galaxy, and we even have an image of one such beast. Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes provides an engaging and accessible account of how we have reached our current understanding of gravity and places these amazing discoveries in their true context. Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes is written in a captivating historical style with stories about the researchers of the past and present that illuminate many key ideas in astronomy and physics. The historical material leads from discussions of the early cosmologies to the great breakthroughs of Tycho and Kepler. We then consider Galileo's contributions to astronomy and mechanics, and the significance of Jeremiah Horrocks's ideas to the Newtonian revolution that would follow. Newton's theories brought about a new scientific age and his description of gravity was unrivalled for over two centuries until it was superseded by Einstein's description in terms of curved spacetime. The outlandish predictions of Einstein's theory have been confirmed again and again, including black holes and gravitational waves. Finally, we move on to more speculative ideas including Hawking radiation and primordial black holes and attempts to find a quantum theory of gravity.

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