Speaker
Description
One of the most exciting predictions of general relativity are black holes. Although the first exact black hole solution has been derived by Schwarzschild soon after Einstein proposed his field equations, the description of general stationary black holes required much more time and effort. Finally, in the 1960's, novel techniques in differential topology and geometry developed by Penrose, Hawking, Geroch and others provided the characterization of the global structure of spacetimes containing a black hole. Many properties of black holes have been discovered due to the global definition of the event horizon, among them are uniqueness, rigidity, no-hair and area theorems, black hole thermodynamics and Hawking effect. However, the realistic black holes are not static nor stationary, and their description should not require a teleological knowledge of the future of the whole spacetime. Therefore, an alternative, local description was proposed by Pajerski and Newman in 1971, and really gained popularity in the late 90's. This framework is referred to as isolated horizons and provides many analogical properties to global black holes. It became one of the favorite research topics of Jerzy Lewandowski. I will present the theory of the isolated horizons and some of the results obtained by Lewandowski and Warsaw relativity group.
