A monograph on inflationary cosmology and cosmological phase transitions, investigating modern cosmology's relationship to elementary particle physics. This work also includes a non-technical discussion of inflationary cosmology for those unfamiliar with the theory.

Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology

/pdf/particle-physics-and-inflationary-cosmology-10bxdfkn16.pdf

We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer encounters nothing unusual at the horizon. Perhaps the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon. Alternatives would seem to require novel dynamics that nevertheless cause notable violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.

Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?

It is assumed that the singularities which occur in gravitational collapse are not visible from outside but are hidden behind an event horizon. This means that one can still predict the future outside the event horizon. A black hole on a spacelike surface is defined to be a connected component of the region of the surface bounded by the event horizon. As time increase, black holes may merge together but can never bifurcate. A black hole would be expected to settle down to a stationary state. It is shown that a stationary black hole must have topologically spherical boundary and must be axisymmetric if it is rotating. These results together with those of Israel and Carter go most of the way towards establishing the conjecture that any stationary black hole is a Kerr solution. Using this conjecture and the result that the surface area of black holes can never decrease, one can place certain limits on the amount of energy that can be extracted from black holes.

/pdf/black-holes-in-general-relativity-38xo58ru75.pdf

Black holes in general relativity

Battelle Rencontres - 1967 Lectures in Mathematics and Physics (Ed. by C. M. DeWitt and J. A. Wheeler). XVII + 557 S. m. Fig. New York/Amsterdam 1968. W. A. Benjamin, Inc.

H.-G. Schöpf

Papers

Battelle Rencontres - 1967 Lectures in Mathematics and Physics (Ed. by C. M. DeWitt and J. A. Wheeler). XVII + 557 S. m. Fig. New York/Amsterdam 1968. W. A. Benjamin, Inc.