Contributor info: Dr Daniel Mayerson

Daniel R. Mayerson

SciPost Phys. 15, 154 (2023) · published 11 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The Geroch-Hansen and Thorne (ACMC) formalisms give rigorous and equivalent definitions for gravitational multipoles in stationary vacuum spacetimes. However, despite their ubiquitous use in gravitational physics, it has not been shown that these formalisms can be generalized to non-vacuum stationary solutions, except in a few special cases. This paper shows how the Geroch-Hansen formalism can be generalized to arbitrary non-vacuum stationary spacetimes for metrics that are sufficiently smooth at infinity. The key is the construction of an improved twist vector, which is well-defined under a mild topological condition on the spacetime (which is automatically satisfied for black holes). Ambiguities in the construction of this improved twist vector are discussed and fixed by imposing natural "gauge fixing" conditions, which also immediately lead to the equivalence between the Geroch-Hansen and Thorne formalisms for such arbitrary stationary spacetimes.

Daniel R. Mayerson, Masaki Shigemori

SciPost Phys. 10, 018 (2021) · published 27 January 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We quantize the D1-D5-P microstate geometries known as superstrata directly in supergravity. We use Rychkov's consistency condition [hep-th/0512053] which was derived for the D1-D5 system; for superstrata, this condition turns out to be strong enough to fix the symplectic form uniquely. For the $(1,0,n)$ superstrata, we further confirm this quantization by a bona-fide explicit computation of the symplectic form using the semi-classical covariant quantization method in supergravity. We use the resulting quantizations to count the known supergravity superstrata states, finding agreement with previous countings that the number of these states grows parametrically smaller than those of the corresponding black hole.

Anthony M. Charles, Daniel R. Mayerson

SciPost Phys. 8, 077 (2020) · published 14 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We model black hole microstates and quantum tunneling transitions between them with networks and simulate their time evolution using well-established tools in network theory. In particular, we consider two models based on Bena-Warner three-charge multi-centered microstates and one model based on the D1-D5 system; we use network theory methods to determine how many centers (or D1-D5 string strands) we expect to see in a typical late-time state. We find three distinct possible phases in parameter space for the late-time behaviour of these networks, which we call ergodic, trapped, and amplified, depending on the relative importance and connectedness of microstates. We analyze in detail how these different phases of late-time behavior are related to the underlying physics of the black hole microstates. Our results indicate that the expected properties of microstates at late times cannot always be determined simply by entropic arguments; typicality is instead a highly non-trivial, emergent property of the full Hilbert space of microstates.