Marginally Outer Trapped (Open) Surfaces in 4+1 Dimensional Schwarzschild

In the case of binary black hole mergers, the surface of most obvious interest, the Event Horizon, is often computationally difficult to locate. Instead, it is useful to turn to quasi-local characterizations of black hole boundaries, such as Marginally Outer Trapped Surfaces (MOTS), which are defined for a single time slice of the spacetime, and the outer-most of which is the apparent horizon. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work focused on understanding MOTS in the interior of a five-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. Similar to the four-dimensional case previously studied, we find examples of self-intersecting MOTS with an arbitrary number of self-intersections. This provides further support that self-intersecting behavior is rather generic. I will also briefly discuss the next stage of our research, which involves further examples of these self-intersecting MOTS, this time in the full Kruskal extension of Schwarzschild.

The Atlantic General Relativity 2020 online postdoc/student seminar series is in the tradition of the annual AGR meetings, providing a forum not only for students and postdocs to present their research and make professional contacts but also to facilitate connections and collaborations between all Atlantic Canadian relativists. The series is student-organized and includes all areas of classical and quantum gravity. Talks will occur on the last Wednesday of every month, with each session consisting of two 30 minute talks. If you would like to attend, please email the organizers for connection details.

Note: all times are Atlantic Time