Based on the fact that the near horizon geometry of the extremal Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes is Nariai geometry, we define the black holes of Nariai class as the configuration whose near-horizon geometry is factorized as two dimensional de Sitter space-time and some compact topology, that is Nariai geometry. We extend the entropy function formalism to the case of the black holes of Nari...

Conditions for thermodynamic stability of asymptotically anti-de Sitter rotating black holes in D-dimensions are determined. Local thermodynamic stability requires not only positivity conditions on the specific heat and the moment of inertia tensor but it is also necessary that the adiabatic compressibility be positive. It is shown that, in the absence of a cosmological constant, neither rotati...

Some aspects of the rotating three-dimensional Einstein-Anti-de-Sitter black hole solution, constructed recently by Banados, Teitelboim and Zanelli are discussed. It is shown explicitly that this black hole represents the most general black hole type solution of the Einstein-Anti-de-Sitter theory. The interpretation of one of the integrals of motion as the spin is discussed. Its physics relies ...

We study the trapped surface produced by an off-center collision of light-like, pointsourced shock waves in anti-de Sitter space. We find an analytic expression for the shape of the trapped surface in the limit where the energy of the shock waves is large and the impact parameter is not too large. We use the area of the trapped surface to estimate a lower bound on the entropy produced in the co...

1 Research report to appear in " New developments in string gravity and physics at the Planck energy scale ". Abstract Recent results on classical and quantum strings in a variety of black hole and cosmological spacetimes, in various dimensions, are presented. The curved backgrounds under consideration include the 2 + 1 black hole anti de Sitter spacetime and its dual, the black string, the ord...

The local and global thermal phase structure for asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes charged under an abelian gauge group, with both Gauss-Bonnet and quartic field strength corrections, is mapped out for all parameter space. We work in the grand canonical ensemble where the external electric potential is held fixed. The analysis is performed in an arbitrary number of dimensions, for all t...

We introduce a simple coordinate system covering half of de Sitter space. The new coordinates have several attractive properties: the time direction is a Killing vector, the metric is smooth at the horizon, and constant-time slices are just flat Euclidean space. We demonstrate the usefulness of the coordinates by calculating the rate at which particles tunnel across the horizon. When self-gravi...