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This thesis focuses on the recent firewall controversy surrounding evaporating black holes, and shows that in the best understood example concerning electrically charged black holes with a flat event horizon in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, the firewall does not arise.
The firewall, which surrounds a sufficiently old black hole, threatens to develop into a huge crisis since it could occur even when spacetime curvature is small, which contradicts general relativity.
However, the end state for asymptotically flat black holes is ill-understood since their curvature becomes unbounded. This issue is avoided by working with flat charged black holes in AdS. The presence of electrical charge is crucial since black holes inevitably pick up charges throughout their long lifetime. These black holes always evolve toward extremal limit, and are then destroyed by quantum gravitational effects. This happens sooner than the time required to decode Hawking radiation so that the firewall never sets in, as conjectured by Harlow and Hayden.
Motivated by the information loss paradox, the author also investigates the possibility that "monster" configurations might exist, with an arbitrarily large interior bounded by a finite surface area. Investigating such an object in AdS shows that in the best understood case, such an object -- much like a firewall -- cannot exist.
List of contents
A Century of Black Hole Physics.- The Mathematical Discovery of Black Holes.- The Thermodynamics of Black Holes.- Positive Mass Theorem, Stability & Phase Transition.- Defining Mass in General Relativity.- Positive Mass and Stability.- The Euclidean Action.- Hiscock and Weems Analysis of Charged Black Holes.- Reissner-Nordström Black Hole Revisited.- The Hiscock and Weems Model.- Why Hawking Radiation Cannot Be Decoded.- Information Decoding vs. the Lifetimes of Charged Black Holes.- Evaporating Charged AdS Black Holes.- Do Hyper-Entropic Objects Exist in Quantum Gravity?.- A Monster is Born.- Monsters in String Theory.
About the author
Yen Chin Ong obtained his Ph.D in Astrophysics from National Taiwan University in 2014, where he was a member of the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (LeCosPA). Prior to this, he obtained a B.Sc.(Hons), as well as a M.Sc., from the Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore. Currently he holds a fellow position at Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA). His primary interest is in black hole physics, especially the properties of various types of black holes in both general relativity and modified gravity, at both classical and quantum levels. He also works on other aspects of gravity and high energy physics, such as cosmology and holography. During his Ph.D program, he wrote 13 articles and 11 of them were published in high-impact journals, such as JHEP, JCAP, PLB, PRD and CQG. By now the total citation to his articles is over 200. In addition to excellence in research, he also received a teaching award in 2014, awarded by National Taiwan University.
