arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Gary W. Gibbons.
We construct the first four-dimensional multi-black hole solution of general relativity with a positive cosmological constant. The solution consists of two static black holes whose gravitational attraction is balanced by the cosmic expansion. These static binaries provide the first four-dimensional example of non-uniqueness in general relativity without matter.
Stephen Hawking's contributions to the understanding of gravity, black holes and cosmology were truly immense. They began with the singularity theorems in the 1960s followed by his discovery that black holes have an entropy and consequently a finite temperature. Black holes were predicted to emit thermal radiation, what is now called Hawking radiation. He pioneered the study of primordial black holes and their potential role in cosmology. His organisation of and contributions to the Nuffield Workshop in 1982 consolidated the picture that the large-scale structure of the universe originated as quantum fluctuations during the inflationary era. Work on the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity resulted in his formulation of the concept of the wavefunction of the universe. The tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity led to his struggles with the information paradox concerning deep connections between these fundamental areas of physics. These achievements were all accomplished following the diagnosis during the early years of Stephen's studies as a post-graduate student in Cambridge that he had incurable motor neuron disease -- he was given two years to live. Against all the odds, he lived a further 55 years. The distinction of his work led to many honours and he became a major public figure, promoting with passion the needs of disabled people. His popular best-selling book A Brief History of Time made cosmology and his own work known to the general public worldwide. He became an icon for science and an inspiration to all.
Electromagnetism in spacetime can be treated in terms of an analogue linear dielectric medium. In this paper, we discuss the gravitational analogue of the linear magnetoelectric effect, which can be found in multiferroic materials. While this is known to occur for metrics with non-zero mixed components, we show how it depends on the choice of spatial formalism for the electromagnetic fields, including in differences in tensor weight, and also on the choice of coordinate chart. This is illustrated for Langevin-Minkowski, four charts of Schwarzschild spacetime, and two charts of pp gravitational waves.
We show that, contrary to what is usually claimed in the literature, the zero mass limit of Kerr spacetime is not flat Minkowski space but a spacetime whose geometry is only locally flat. This limiting spacetime, as the Kerr spacetime itself, contains two asymptotic regions and hence cannot be topologically trivial. It also contains a curvature singularity, because the power-law singularity of the Weyl tensor vanishes in the limit but there remains a distributional contribution of the Ricci tensor. This spacetime can be interpreted as a wormhole sourced by a negative tension ring. We also extend the discussion to similarly interpret the zero mass limit of the Kerr-(anti)-de Sitter spacetime.
We study solutions obtained via applying dualities and complexifications to the vacuum Weyl metrics generated by massive rods and by point masses. Rescaling them and extending to complex parameter values yields axially symmetric vacuum solutions containing conical singularities along circles that can be viewed as singular matter sources. These solutions have wormhole topology with several asymptotic regions interconnected by throats and their sources can be viewed as thin rings of negative tension encircling the throats. For a particular value of the ring tension the geometry becomes exactly flat although the topology remains non-trivial, so that the rings literally produce holes in flat space. To create a single ring wormhole of one metre radius one needs a negative energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. Further duality transformations dress the rings with the scalar field, either conventional or phantom. This gives rise to large classes of static, axially symmetric solutions, presumably including all previously known solutions for a gravity-coupled massless scalar field, as for example the spherically symmetric Bronnikov-Ellis wormholes with phantom scalar. The multi-wormholes contain infinite struts along the symmetry axes, apart from solutions with locally flat geometry.
Convexity and convex functions play an important role in theoretical physics. To initiate a study of the possible uses of convex functions in General Relativity, we discuss the consequences of a spacetime $(M,g_{μν})$ or an initial data set $(Σ, h_{ij}, K_{ij})$ admitting a suitably defined convex function. We show how the existence of a convex function on a spacetime places restrictions on the properties of the spacetime geometry.
In certain circumstances tools of Riemannian geometry are sufficient to address questions arising in the more general Finslerian context. We show that one such instance presents itself in the characterisation of geodesics in Randers spaces of constant flag curvature. To achieve a simple, Riemannian derivation of this special family of curves, we exploit the connection between Randers spaces and the Zermelo problem of time-optimal navigation in the presence of background fields. The characterisation of geodesics is then proven by generalising an intuitive argument developed recently for the solution of the quantum Zermelo problem.
We apply duality rotations and complex transformations to the Schwarzschild metric to obtain wormhole geometries with two asymptotically flat regions connected by a throat. In the simplest case these are the well-known wormholes supported by phantom scalar field. Further duality rotations remove the scalar field to yield less well known vacuum metrics of the oblate Zipoy-Voorhees-Weyl class, which describe ring wormholes. The ring encircles the wormhole throat and can have any radius, whereas its tension is always negative and should be less than $-c^4/4G$. If the tension reaches the maximal value, the geometry becomes exactly flat, but the topology remains non-trivial and corresponds to two copies of Minkowski space glued together along the disk encircled by the ring. The geodesics are straight lines, and those which traverse the ring get to the other universe. The ring therefore literally produces a hole in space. Such wormholes could perhaps be created by negative energies concentrated in toroidal volumes, for example by vacuum fluctuations.
In this work a series of methods are developed for understanding the Friedmann equation when it is beyond the reach of the Chebyshev theorem. First it will be demonstrated that every solution of the Friedmann equation admits a representation as a roulette such that information on the latter may be used to obtain that for the former. Next the Friedmann equation is integrated for a quadratic equation of state and for the Randall--Sundrum II universe, leading to a harvest of a rich collection of new interesting phenomena. Finally an analytic method is used to isolate the asymptotic behavior of the solutions of the Friedmann equation, when the equation of state is of an extended form which renders the integration impossible, and to establish a universal exponential growth law.
We study the thermodynamical properties of a class of asymptotically conical (AC) geometries known as "subtracted geometries". We derive the mass and angular momentum from the regulated Komar Integral and the Hawking-Horowitz prescription and show that they are equivalent. By deriving the asymptotic charges we show that the Smarr formula and the first law of thermodynamics hold. We also propose an analog of Christodulou-Ruffini inequality. The analysis can be generalized to other AC geometries.
This paper is a continuation of our earlier study on the integrability of the Friedmann equations in the light of the Chebyshev theorem. Our main focus will be on a series of important, yet not previously touched, problems when the equation of state for the perfect-fluid universe is nonlinear. These include the generalized Chaplygin gas, two-term energy density, trinomial Friedmann, Born--Infeld, and two-fluid models. We show that some of these may be integrated using Chebyshev's result while other are out of reach by the theorem but may be integrated explicitly by other methods. With the explicit integration, we are able to understand exactly the roles of the physical parameters in various models play in the cosmological evolution. For example, in the Chaplygin gas universe, it is seen that, as far as there is a tiny presence of nonlinear matter, linear matter makes contribution to the dark matter, which becomes significant near the phantom divide line. The Friedmann equations also arise in areas of physics not directly related to cosmology. We provide some examples ranging from geometric optics and central orbits to soap films and the shape of glaciated valleys to which our results may be applied.
The quantum navigation problem of finding the time-optimal control Hamiltonian that transports a given initial state to a target state through quantum wind, that is, under the influence of external fields or potentials, is analysed. By lifting the problem from the state space to the space of unitary gates realising the required task, we are able to deduce the form of the solution to the problem by deriving a universal quantum speed limit. The expression thus obtained indicates that further simplifications of this apparently difficult problem are possible if we switch to the interaction picture of quantum mechanics. A complete solution to the navigation problem for an arbitrary quantum system is then obtained, and the behaviour of the solution is illustrated in the case of a two-level system.
This short but systematic work demonstrates a link between Chebyshev's theorem and the explicit integration in cosmological time $t$ and conformal time $η$ of the Friedmann equations in all dimensions and with an arbitrary cosmological constant $Λ$. More precisely, it is shown that for spatially flat universes an explicit integration in $t$ may always be carried out, and that, in the non-flat situation and when $Λ$ is zero and the ratio $w$ of the pressure and energy density in the barotropic equation of state of the perfect-fluid universe is rational, an explicit integration may be carried out if and only if the dimension $n$ of space and $w$ obey some specific relations among an infinite family. The situation for explicit integration in $η$ is complementary to that in $t$. More precisely, it is shown in the flat-universe case with $Λ\neq0$ that an explicit integration in $η$ can be carried out if and only if $w$ and $n$ obey similar relations among a well-defined family which we specify, and that, when $Λ=0$, an explicit integration can always be carried out whether the space is flat, closed, or open. We also show that our method may be used to study more realistic cosmological situations when the equation of state is nonlinear.
We study the vacuum polarization of a massless minimally coupled scalar field at the horizon of four-charge STU black holes. We compare the results for the standard asymptotically flat black holes and for the black holes obtained in the "subtracted limit", both in the general static case and at the horizon pole for the general rotating case. The original and the subtracted results are identical only in the BPS limit, and have opposite sign in the extremal Kerr limit. We also compute the vacuum polarization on the static solutions that interpolate between both the original and the subtracted case through a solution-generating transformation and show that the vacuum polarization stays positive throughout the interpolating solution. In the Appendix we provide a closed-form solution for the Green's function on general (static or rotating) subtracted black hole geometries.
In a previous paper [arXiv:1308.1852] we showed how a finite system of discrete particles interacting with each other via Newtonian gravitational attraction would lead to precisely the same dynamical equations for homothetic motion as in the case of the pressure-free Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker cosmological models of General Relativity Theory, provided the distribution of particles obeys the central configuration equation. In this paper we show one can obtain perturbed such Newtonian solutions that give the same linearised structure growth equations as in the general relativity case. We also obtain the Dmitriev-Zeldovich equations for subsystems in this discrete gravitational model, and show how it leads to the conclusion that voids have an apparent negative mass.
Starting from the geometrical concept of a 4-dimensional de-Sitter configuration of spheres in Euclidean 3-space and modelling voids in the Universe as spheres, we show that a uniform distribution over this configuration space implies a power-law for the void number density which is consistent with results from the excursion set formalism and with data, for an intermediate range of void volumes. The scaling dimension of the large scale structure can be estimated as well. We also discuss the effect of restricting the survey geometry on the void statistics. This work is a new application of de-Sitter geometry to cosmology and also provides a new geometrical perspective on self-similarity in cosmology.
The cumulative size-frequency distributions of impact craters on planetary bodies in the solar system appear to approximate a universal inverse square power-law for small crater radii. In this article, we show how this distribution can be understood easily in terms of geometrical statistics, using a de-Sitter geometry of the configuration space of circles on the Euclidean plane and on the unit sphere. The effect of crater overlap is also considered.
An exact solution representing black holes in an expanding universe is found. The black holes are maximally charged and the universe is expanding with arbitrary equation of state. It is an exact solution of the Einstein-scalar-Maxwell system, in which we have two Maxwell-type U(1) fields coupled to the scalar field. The potential of the scalar field is an exponential. We find a regular horizon, which depends on one parameter (the ratio of the energy density of U(1) fields to that of the scalar field). The horizon is static because of the balance on the horizon between gravitational attractive force and U(1) repulsive force acting on the scalar field. We also calculate the black hole temperature.