arXiv subjects

Usman Zafar

Publications and source records attributed to Usman Zafar.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Geometric effects of torsion on black hole ringdown and shadows in Poincar\'e gauge gravity

Spacetime torsion provides a natural extension of general relativity and may lead to black hole solutions that differ significantly from their Einsteinian counterparts. We investigate a class of Reissner-Nordstr\"om-like black holes in Poincar\'e gauge gravity, where the effective charge is generated entirely by spacetime torsion instead of an electromagnetic field. Within the physically relevant torsion sector, the spacetime exhibits a single-horizon structure, free from the inner horizons and extremal states characteristic of charged black holes. Using the sixth-order Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation, Leaver's continued-fraction method, and the eikonal correspondence between quasinormal modes and unstable null geodesics, we study scalar perturbations and spin-2 test fields on the torsion-modified background. We find that increasing torsion decreases both the oscillation frequencies and damping rates, leading to longer-lived ringdown signals. We further compare the model predictions with Event Horizon Telescope observations of Sgr A* and M87*, along with representative LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) ringdown scales, to derive constraints on the torsion parameter via a profile-$\chi^{2}$ analysis supplemented by Monte Carlo sampling. Although the resulting bounds remain consistent with the Schwarzschild limit within current observational uncertainties, our results show that spacetime torsion leaves correlated imprints on both black hole shadows and ringdown observables.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

On the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford chaos bound in black hole spacetimes: Saturation, apparent violations, and their geometric origin

Reported violations of the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) chaos bound in black hole spacetimes raise the question of whether they reflect a genuine breakdown, a feature of particular geometries, or a limitation of the probe used to test the bound. We show that the violations are apparent and arise predominantly in the near-extremal regime, where the black hole develops an $AdS_2\times S^2$ throat, the surface gravity becomes parametrically small, while the Lyapunov exponent of an orbit separated from the throat remains nonzero. We establish a geometric criterion governing this behavior and demonstrate its resolution in two complementary ways: a charged-particle construction that localizes an otherwise excluded orbit within the throat and restores exact saturation, and an out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) calculation in the Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) throat, which identifies the near-horizon Lyapunov scale and shows why the photon-sphere exponent does not reproduce it when the orbit remains outside the throat. We illustrate the criterion for static and rotating black holes in Einstein, scalar-tensor, and higher-curvature gravity, representative of a broader class of geometries to which it applies. In the absence of external effects that displace the relevant trajectories from the throat, the MSS bound remains respected; the apparent violations instead reflect a geometric decoupling between the probe and the near-horizon region.

hep-th↗

arXiv2026

Thermodynamics and optical aspects of ModMax black holes in higher order curvature gravity with quintessence dark energy

In this work, we derive an exact black hole solution in higher-order curvature gravity by coupling an electromagnetic sector formulated within the ModMax framework to a quintessence dark energy component. Focusing on purely electrically charged configurations, we analyze the thermodynamic and geothermodynamic properties of the solution to investigate its stability and phase structure. Within this sector, the ModMax theory effectively reduces Maxwell electrodynamics up to a rescaling of the electric charge, and thus the obtained solution corresponds to a consistent subset of the broader nonlinear theory. Using thermodynamic geometry, we examine microscopic interactions and phase transitions, showing that divergences in the thermodynamic curvature coincide with the vanishing of the heat capacity, confirming the consistency of the phase structure. We further explore the optical properties of the black hole by studying null geodesics and determining the photon sphere and the corresponding shadow radius for different values of the quintessence state parameter $\omega$. Exact analytical expressions for the photon-sphere radius are derived, revealing that higher-order curvature corrections and quintessence significantly enhance the shadow size, whereas the electric charge has the opposite effect. Notably, quintessence is found to have a more pronounced impact on the shadow than the charge. These results highlight that dark energy and higher-order curvature corrections can yield potentially observable signatures in black hole shadows.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Generalized First Law and Smarr Formula: Beyond Additivity and Extensivity

The study of black hole thermodynamics becomes a central topic in gravitational physics, where the first law and the Smarr relation establish a deep connection between spacetime geometry and thermodynamic laws. As we know, these relations depend on the entropy; any modification to the entropy arising from quantum gravity or generalized statistical mechanics may impact the basic thermodynamic framework of black holes. In this work, we develop a general framework for deriving the first law of black hole thermodynamics and the associated Smarr relation for generic spherically symmetric spacetime under a wide class of generalized entropy models. In addition, a generalized Ruppeiner thermodynamic geometry is developed to utilize the generalized entropy model, from which the curvature scalar is determined in a general form. To demonstrate this framework, we assume the Resinser-Nordstr\"{o}m black hole and investigate the corresponding extremal and non-extremal phase transition. Interestingly, our analysis reveals that entropy models consistent with the Ab\`{e}-type composition rule result in a vanishing thermodynamic curvature, whereas violations of this rule exhibit curvature divergences, suggesting a geometric test for the consistency of generalized entropy models.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Thermodynamic Topology and Photon Spheres Analysis of Black Holes in Brane-World: Insights from Barrow Entropy

We explore the thermodynamics and geothermodynamics of black holes with Barrow entropy in a brane-world scenario, where the horizon geometry of the black hole is regarded as a fractal structure. Our analysis reveals the behavior of heat capacity, identifying both bound and divergence points. For the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the divergence point exhibits smooth behavior, indicating no phase transition. In contrast, we observe divergence with Barrow entropy as the deformation parameter increases, confirming the presence of a zero point in heat capacity through various thermodynamic geometry formalisms. Additionally, we delve into thermodynamic topology, detailing the classification of black holes in the brane-world context and comparing their characteristics determined from the Bekenstein-Hawking and the Barrow entropy. Notably, fixing the deformation and cosmological parameters results in a topological charge $-1$ predominately by the dark matter parameter, which remains unaffected despite variations in other parameters. In the dS model, the cosmological horizon prevents stable photon spheres, making topological charges of $0$ and $+1$ unattainable. Incremental increases in the cosmological parameter reduce the dark matter parameter-dominated region.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Physical constraints on the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford chaos-bound in black hole spacetimes

Chaotic motion near black holes has recently been examined through the lens of the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) chaos-bound, but reported violations remain contradictory. A significant source of ambiguity stems from treating the particle angular momentum as an independently adjustable parameter instead of as a quantity fixed by the circular-orbit conditions. We develop a constrained framework in which the angular momentum is determined self-consistently from the geometry. Applied to the charged Kiselev black hole, this framework shows that certain previously reported violations of the chaos bound can be attributed to inconsistent parameter choices rather than to intrinsic curvature effects. By extending the analysis to geometries containing higher-order curvature terms, we find genuine chaos-bound violations at large charge-to-mass ratios, originating from curvature corrections rather than orbital parameters. Our approach, therefore, provides a systematic means to distinguish between parameter-induced (apparent) and curvature-induced (physical) violations in Einstein gravity and its extensions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2025

An innovative black hole solution and thermodynamic properties in higher-order curvature gravity with a scalar field

A spherically symmetric black hole solution defined by the gravitational mass is explored in higher-order curvature gravity associated with a scalar field. It is demonstrated that the singularities of the curvature invariants will be far weaker around the central region of the black hole than those in general relativity, owing to the effect originating from higher-order curvatures with the coupling to a dynamical scalar field. Furthermore, thermodynamic properties and the Davies-type phase transition of the black hole are investigated for Barrow entropy with a quantum effect of gravitation. It is found that both the quasi-local energy and Gibbs free energy are positive, and the black hole can hence be stable on the smooth horizon surface. In addition, by analyzing the geodesic deviation, the stability conditions of the black hole are explicitly shown.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Thermodynamic and observational implications of black holes in toroidal geometry

We investigate the thermodynamic and observational implications for the charged torus-like black holes, a class of solutions distinct from the classical Schwarzschild black holes. We explicitly derive the fundamental thermodynamic properties, such as heat capacity, P-V diagram, isothermal compressibility, Helmholtz free energy, and Gibbs free energy, under different entropy models. We find that only the exponential corrected entropy demonstrates multiple phase transitions, which we validate with the Ricci Scalar divergence obtained from the Ruppeiner formalism. This indicates that exponential corrected entropy is more sensitive to BH's microstructure as compared to the Hawking-Bekenstein and R\`{e}nyi entropy models. In addition, we study the sparsity and emission rates of Hawking radiation, demonstrating that exponential correction entropy yields more consistent and stable behavior. In our observational analysis, we graphically demonstrate the behavior of redshift, blueshift, and gravitational shift, and identify specific conditions where the photon sphere radius exceeds the innermost stable circular orbit radius, which depends on the values of parameters such as electric charge and cosmological constant. The novel insight of this work is that despite this violation, our computed redshift, blueshift, and gravitational shifts fall within the range of the observational data of NGC 4258 and UGC 3789.

hep-th↗

arXiv2025

Exploring the Effects of Generalized Entropy onto Bardeen Black Hole Surrounded by Cloud of Strings

This work explores the thermodynamic characteristics and geothermodynamics of a Bardeen black hole (BH) that interacts with a string cloud and is minimally connected to nonlinear electrodynamics. To avoid the singularities throughout the cosmic evolution, we consider an entropy function which comprises five parameters. In addition, by employing this entropy function for the specific range of parameters, we obtain the representations of BH entropy based on the holographic principle. Moreover, we employ this entropy function to investigate its impact on the thermodynamics of the BH by studying various thermodynamic properties like mass, temperature, heat capacity, and Gibbs free energy for numerous scalar charge and string cloud values. To support our investigation, we use various geothermodynamics formalisms to evaluate the stable behavior and identify different physical scenarios. Furthermore, in this analysis, we observe that only one entropy formalism provides us with better results regarding the thermodynamic behavior of the BH. Moreover, it is shown that one of the entropy models provides a thermodynamic geometric behavior compared to the other entropy models.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Thermodynamic analysis of black holes with cloud of strings and quintessence via Barrow entropy

We explore a Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m Anti-de Sitter (RN-AdS) black hole with a cloud of string and quintessence to study thermodynamics and thermodynamic topology in the presence of Barrow entropy, which is currently being used widely as the horizon of a black hole may not be a smooth surface as described in classical general relativity but instead could have a more intricate fractal-like structure. Here, we study the impact of the fractal correction parameter of Barrow entropy on the thermodynamics of such BHs. We compute the first law of black hole thermodynamics and the Smarr relation for RN-AdS black hole with a cloud of string and quintessence in terms of Barrow entropy by employing the generalized formula for spherically symmetric spacetime which is directly derived from the Einstein field equation. The significance of Barrow entropy has been verified from thermodynamic topology as well. We also found that the non-zero topological charge indicates the presence of the critical point.

hep-th↗

arXiv2017

Improving Text Normalization by Optimizing Nearest Neighbor Matching

Text normalization is an essential task in the processing and analysis of social media that is dominated with informal writing. It aims to map informal words to their intended standard forms. Previously proposed text normalization approaches typically require manual selection of parameters for improved performance. In this paper, we present an automatic optimizationbased nearest neighbor matching approach for text normalization. This approach is motivated by the observation that text normalization is essentially a matching problem and nearest neighbor matching with an adaptive similarity function is the most direct procedure for it. Our similarity function incorporates weighted contributions of contextual, string, and phonetic similarity, and the nearest neighbor matching involves a minimum similarity threshold. These four parameters are tuned efficiently using grid search. We evaluate the performance of our approach on two benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that parameter tuning on small sized labeled datasets produce state-of-the-art text normalization performances. Thus, this approach allows practically easy construction of evolving domain-specific normalization lexicons

cs.CL↗