| After a brief overview of some of the most interesting known properties of black holes, we focus on several distinct aspects which might be of eventual relevance to questions in quantum gravity. First, we study the issue of cosmic censorship, i.e. whether singularities arising from generic regular initial conditions can be observable from far away. We suggest a candidate for cosmic censorship violation through overcharging a near-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole. We then turn to the encoding of black holes by a dual nongravitational description. Such a description is possible due to a recent advance in string theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence, which relates string theory on asymptotically Anti de Sitter (AdS) spacetime to a lower-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). This study is partitioned into three chapters. First, large black holes and their field theoretic dual are examined by considering the decay of their perturbations. These are given by quasinormal modes of the black hole, which describe the approach to thermal equilibrium in the field theory. Next, we establish the existence of small ten dimensional black holes localized in AdS5 × S5, by finding a consistent solution to the five form field equations in a ten dimensional Schwarzschild spacetime. Finally, in attempt to probe how these small black holes are encoded, we study the information about generic small objects carried by local expectation values in the dual field theory. We find them to contain an enormous amount of information, including all the multipole moments of a small source as well as the size of spherical objects. We comment on the relation of our results to quantum gravity and speculate about further directions of research. |
