Person:

Anous, Tarek

We initiate a systematic study of the state space of non-extremal, stationary black hole bound states in four-dimensional (N) = 2 supergravity. Specifically, we show that an exponential multitude of classically stable "halo" bound states can be formed between large finite temperature D4-D0 black hole cores and much smaller, arbitrarily charged black holes at the same temperature. We map out in full the regions of existence for thermodynamically stable and metastable bound states in terms of the core's charges and temperature, as well as the region of stability of the core itself. Several features of these systems, such as a macroscopic configurational entropy and exponential relaxation timescales, are similar to those of the extended family of glasses. We draw parallels between the two with a view toward understanding complex systems in fundamental physics.

This dissertation is split into two distinct halves. The first covers various calculations done in order gain insights on holography in de Sitter space. The dispersion relation of linear perturbations of empty de Sitter space are numerically computed as a function of the location of a hypersurface on which conformal Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed. When the hypersurface is near the south pole, the dispersion relation is linear, whereas for a hypersurface near the cosmological horizon, it satisfies that of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation. This result is shown to hold for non-linear perturbations. We also compute the thermodynamic stability of rotating black holes in (dS_4) as a function of their mass and angular momentum. We focus particularly on the rotating Nariai geometry, which is a near horizon limit of the rotating black hole as the outer and cosmological horizons tend towards each other. We study massless scalar fields in these backgrounds and obtain their quasinormal mode spectrum explicitly. We uncover an interesting structure in their two-point functions, namely that they resemble thermal Green's functions of a two-dimensional conformal field theory. The second half of this dissertation deals with the study of multicentered black holes in string theory and their finite temperature extensions. We show that there exist finite temperature single-centered solutions in (\mathcal{N}=2) supergravity in asymptotically flat space that admit bound states with BPS probe particles. We compute the existence regions of these bound states as well as their dependence on temperature. We embed these solutions in Fayet-Illiopoulos gauged supergravity and show that bound states persist in asymptotically (AdS_4) spacetimes. We make attempts to understand these disordered bound states as amorphous/glassy phases of the dual conformal field theory.