Black hole spacetimes with Killing-Yano symmetries

We present a brief overview of black hole spacetimes admitting Killing-Yano tensors. In vacuum these include Kerr-NUT-(A)dS metrics and certain black brane solutions. In the presence of matter fields, (conformal) Killing-Yano symmetries are known to exist for the Plebanski-Demianski solution and (trivially) for any spacetime with spherical symmetry. Special attention is devoted to generalized Killing-Yano tensors of black holes in minimal gauged supergravity. Several aspects directly related to the existence of Killing-Yano tensors, such as the Kerr-Schild form, algebraic type of spacetimes, and separability of field equations, are also briefly discussed.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, prepared for the proceedings of the ICMP 09, v2:upgraded reference

Black Hole Chemistry

The mass of a black hole has traditionally been identified with its energy. We describe a new perspective on black hole thermodynamics, one that identifies the mass of a black hole with chemical enthalpy, and the cosmological constant as thermodynamic pressure. This leads to an understanding of black holes from the viewpoint of chemistry, in terms of concepts such as Van der Waals fluids, reentrant phase transitions, and triple points. Both charged and rotating black holes exhibit novel chemical-type phase behaviour, hitherto unseen.Comment: 12 pages, Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation 2014 Awards for Essays on Gravitatio

Reentrant Phase Transitions in Rotating AdS Black Holes

We study the thermodynamics of higher-dimensional singly spinning asymptotically AdS black holes in the canonical (fixed J) ensemble of extended phase space, where the cosmological constant is treated as pressure and the corresponding conjugate quantity is interpreted as thermodynamic volume. Along with the usual small/large black hole phase transition, we find a new phenomenon of reentrant phase transitions for all d>5 dimensions, in which a monotonic variation of the temperature yields two phase transitions from large to small and back to large black holes. This situation is similar to that seen in multicomponent liquids.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Weakly charged generalized Kerr-NUT-(A)dS spacetimes

We find an explicit solution of the source free Maxwell equations in a generalized Kerr-NUT-(A)dS spacetime in all dimensions. This solution is obtained as a linear combination of the closed conformal Killing-Yano tensor $h_{ab}$, which is present in such a spacetime, and a derivative of the primary Killing vector, associated with $h_{ab}$. For the vanishing cosmological constant the obtained solution reduces to the Wald's electromagnetic field generated from the primary Killing vector.Comment: 4 pages, no figures v2: added reference

New Metrics Admitting the Principal Killing-Yano Tensor

It is believed that in any number of dimensions the off-shell Kerr-NUT-(A)dS metric represents a unique geometry admitting the principal (rank 2, non-degenerate, closed conformal Killing-Yano) tensor. The original proof relied on the Euclidean signature and therein natural assumption that the eigenvalues of the principal tensor have gradients of spacelike character. In this paper we evade this common wisdom and construct new classes of Lorentzian (and other signature) off-shell metrics admitting the principal tensor with null eigenvalues, uncovering so a much richer structure of spacetimes with principal tensor in four and higher dimensions. A few observations regarding the Kerr-Schild ansatz are also made.Comment: 9 pages, no figures. v2: minor expansions, added reference