AbstractsAstronomy & Space Science

Force-free magnetospheres, Kerr-AdS black holes and holography

by Xun Wang




Institution: University of Victoria
Department:
Degree: PhD
Year: 2014
Keywords: Kerr-AdS; black holes; force-free magnetosphere; AdS/CFT; holography; Blandford-Znajek (BZ) process
Record ID: 2057566
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5811


Abstract

In this thesis, we study the energy extraction from rotating black holes in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime (Kerr-AdS black holes), via the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) process. The motivation is the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence which provides a duality between gravitational physics in asymptotically AdS spacetimes and lower dimensional boundary field theories. The BZ process operates via a force-free magnetosphere around black holes and the rotational energy of the black hole is extracted electromagnetically in the form of Poynting flux. The major part of the thesis is devoted to obtaining force-free solutions in the Kerr-AdS background, which generalize traditional BZ solutions in the asymptotically flat Kerr background. Given the solutions, we use the AdS/CFT to infer dual descriptions in terms of the boundary field theory, which hopefully will lead to a better understanding of the energy extraction for rotating black holes. Graduate