Advanced lectures on general relativity (Q1756388)

These lecture notes are about some recent advances in general relativity including topics such as Noether theory, three-dimensional gravity, asymptotic flatness and rotating black holes. The latter topic is relevant not only theoretically but even from the currently rapidly developing astronomical-observational viewpoint. The book contains four chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to surface charges in gravitation and describes an extension of classical Noether theory about symmetries and conserved quantities to include gauge and diffeomorphism symmetries as well; Chapter 2 is about three-dimensional gravity and contains an introduction to (asymptotically) $\mathrm{AdS}_3$ geometries, BTZ black holes, their phase spaces, the $\mathrm{AdS}_3/\mathrm{CFT}_2$ correspondence and finally the reformulation of 3-dimensional gravity as a Chern-Simons theory; Chapter 3 is an introduction to (4-dimensional) asymptotic flatness; Chapter 4 contains recent hot topics on rotating black holes paying special attention to the extremal Kerr black hole case, to a proposed $Kerr/\mathrm{CFT}_2$ correspondence and finally to ``black hole spectroscopy'' (i.e. studying the oscillation modes of linearly perturbed Kerr black holes) which is a rapidly developing field directly related with the observational (both classical and gravitational) astronomy of the 2010's. About the style of the book: In accordance with the author's aim to target young PhD students in physics or postdocs, these lecture notes have definitely been written in the language and style of physicists. This means, among other things, that all the proofs of the theorems (e.g. Noether's first and second theorem, etc.) are skipped; moreover, the material is presented in the language and notation of local coordinate frames, hence e.g. global, topological questions are not touched.