Cosmological and black hole apparent horizons (Q2348307)

This book provides an overview over the different types of horizons and the literature related to this topic. The author characterizes a horizon, roughly speaking, as ``a surface which separates a region of space-time which is accessible to an observer from one which is not and from which this observer cannot receive light or other physical signals''. In special relativity, so-called Rindler horizons occur already as kinematical effects observed by uniformly accelerated observers. In general relativity, on finds a variety of other horizons as properties of special solutions of Einstein's field equations. The exposition is simplified by assuming spherical symmetry. As the author states, this ``simplified exposition is not comprehensive and can certainly be made more rigorous: the reader can find more detailed and technically more satisfactory treatments in the references provided, but those would break the flow of our discussion''. In the first chapter, stationary solutions (Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordström, Kerr and Kerr-Newman metrics), which often are associated with black holes (so that such solutions are called ``black holes''), are analyzed in brief. This provides the basis for the following study of the behavior of families of time-like and light-like curves what, in the second chapter, allows to characterize different types of horizons (Rindler, event, Killing, apparent, trapping, and isolated and dynamical horizons) and to introduce the notion of surface gravity which is related to black hole thermodynamics and Hawking radiation. Before turning to the more complicated horizons of time-dependent black holes, in the third chapter, the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker solution of Einstein's equations is considered which, in general, obtains time-dependent apparent horizons. In particular, coordinate systems are tried to find that are ``useful to study Hawking radiation from cosmological horizons and, later, from the time-dependent horizons of black holes embedded in time-varying cosmological backgrounds''. This chapter concludes with some critical comments on the thermodynamics of apparent horizons. To understand apparent and trapping horizons and their dynamics, in the last two chapters, the author studies analytic solutions of general relativity (which are again spherically symmetric) and of alternative theories of gravity (Brans-Dicke and \(f(R)\) theories) representing central inhomogeneities embedded in cosmological ``backgrounds''. Here, the quotation marks hint at the problem that, due to the non-linear structure of the gravitational equations, their solutions cannot be split into background and a part describing a spherical inhomogeneity that mimics, e.g., a black hole. For this and other reasons, the dynamics of apparent horizons is ``definitely not settled'' such that the aim of these chapters is (and can only be) to collect and summarize the existing results ``as an introduction and a toolkit for researchers approaching this field, especially graduate students''.