Robert C. Myers

Black holes in higher dimensional space-times

Black hole solutions to Einsteins equations are examined in asymptotically flat N + 1 dimensional space-times. First generalizations of Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom solutions are examined in a discussion of static black holes in N + 1 dimensions. Then a new family of solutions is found which describe spinning black holes in higher dimensional space-times. In many respects these new solutions are similar to the familiar Kerr and Schwarzschild metrics which are recovered for N = 3. One exceptional case though is that for N ≥ 5, black holes with a fixed mass may have arbitrarily large angular momentum.

Charged AdS black holes and catastrophic holography

We compute the properties of a class of charged black holes in anti‐de Sitter space-time, in diverse dimensions. These black holes are solutions of consistent Einstein-Maxwell truncations of gauged supergravities, which are shown to arise from the inclusion of rotation in the transverse space. We uncover rich thermodynamic phase structures for these systems, which display classic critical phenomena, including structures isomorphic to the van der Waals‐Maxwell liquid-gas system. In that case, the phases are controlled by the universal ‘‘cusp’’ and ‘‘swallowtail’’ shapes familiar from catastrophe theory. All of the thermodynamics is consistent with field theory interpretations via holography, where the dual field theories can sometimes be found on the world volumes of coincident rotating branes. @S0556-2821~99!02316-4#

Towards a derivation of holographic entanglement entropy

We provide a derivation of holographic entanglement entropy for spherical entangling surfaces. Our construction relies on conformally mapping the boundary CFT to a hyperbolic geometry and observing that the vacuum state is mapped to a thermal state in the latter geometry. Hence the conformal transformation maps the entanglement entropy to the thermodynamic entropy of this thermal state. The AdS/CFT dictionary allows us to calculate this thermodynamic entropy as the horizon entropy of a certain topological black hole. In even dimensions, we also demonstrate that the universal contribution to the entanglement entropy is given by A-type trace anomaly for any CFT, without reference to holography.

Viscosity bound violation in higher derivative gravity

Motivated by the vast string landscape, we consider the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in conformal field theories dual to Einstein gravity with curvature square corrections. After field redefinitions these theories reduce to Gauss-Bonnet gravity, which has special properties that allow us to compute the shear viscosity nonperturbatively in the Gauss-Bonnet coupling. By tuning of the coupling, the value of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio can be adjusted to any positive value from infinity down to zero, thus violating the conjectured viscosity bound. At linear order in the coupling, we also check consistency of four different methods to calculate the shear viscosity, and we find that all of them agree. We search for possible pathologies associated with this class of theories violating the viscosity bound.

D-branes and spinning black holes

Abstract We obtain a new class of spinning charged extremal black holes in five dimensions, considered both as classical configurations and in the Dirichlet (D)-brane representation. The degeneracy of states is computed from the D-brane side and the entropy agrees perfectly with that obtained from the black hole side.

On black hole entropy

Two techniques for computing black hole entropy in generally covariant gravity theories including arbitrary higher derivative interactions are studied. The techniques are Walds Noether charge approach introduced recently, and a field redefinition method developed in this paper. Walds results are extended by establishing that his local geometric expression for the black hole entropy gives the same result when evaluated on an arbitrary cross section of a Killing horizon (rather than just the bifurcation surface). Further, we show that his expression for the entropy is not affected by ambiguities which arise in the Noether construction. Using the Noether charge expression, the entropy is evaluated explicitly for black holes in a wide class of generally covariant theories. For a Lagrangian of the functional form L\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}=L\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}(

Holographic c-theorems in arbitrary dimensions

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Towards a holographic dual of large N(c) QCD

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The AdS / CFT correspondence and a new positive energy conjecture for general relativity

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