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A Relativist's Toolkit
The Mathematics of Black-Hole Mechanics
Eric Poisson
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606601
Online ISBN: 9780511606601
Hardback ISBN: 9780521830911
Paperback ISBN: 9780521537803

Chapter
Preface pp. xi-xv
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606601.001
Cambridge University Press

Preface

Does the world really need a new textbook on general relativity? I feel that my rst
duty in presenting this book should be to provide a convincing afrmative answer
to this question.
There already exists a vast array of available books. I will not attempt here to
make an exhaustive list, but I will mention three of my favourites. For its unsurpassed pedagogical presentation of the elementary aspects of general relativity, I
like Schutzs A rst course in general relativity. For its unsurpassed completeness,
I like Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. And for its unsurpassed elegance and rigour, I like Walds General Relativity. In my view, a serious student
could do no better than start with Schutz for an outstanding introductory course,
then move on to Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler to get a broad coverage of many
different topics and techniques, and then nish off with Wald to gain access to the
more modern topics and the mathematical standard that Wald has since imposed on
this eld. This is a long route, but with this book I hope to help the student along.
I see my place as being somewhere between Schutz and Wald more advanced
than Schutz but less sophisticated than Wald and I cover some of the few topics
that are not handled by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.
In the winter of 1998 I was given the responsibility of creating an advanced
course in general relativity. The course was intended for graduate students working
in the Gravitation Group of the Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute, a joint graduate programme in Physics shared by the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo. I
thought long and hard before giving the rst offering of this course, in an effort
to round up the most useful and interesting topics, and to create the best possible
course. I came up with a few guiding principles. First, I wanted to let the students
in on a number of results and techniques that are part of every relativists arsenal,
but are not adequately covered in the popular texts. Second, I wanted the course
to be practical, in the sense that the students would learn how to compute things
instead of being subjected to a bunch of abstract concepts. And third, I wanted to
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Preface

put these techniques to work in a really cool application of the theory, so that this
whole enterprise would seem to have purpose.
As I developed the course it became clear that it would not match the material
covered in any of the existing textbooks; to meet my requirements I would have to
form a synthesis of many texts, I would have to consult review articles, and I would
have to go to the technical literature. This was a long but enjoyable undertaking,
and I learned a lot. It gave me the opportunity to homogenize the various separate
treatments, consolidate the various different notations, and present this synthesis
as a unied whole. During this process I started to type up lecture notes that would
be distributed to the students. These have evolved into this book.
In the end, the course was designed around my choice of really cool application. There was no contest: the immediate winner was the mathematical theory of
black holes, surely one of the most elegant, successful, and relevant applications
of general relativity. This is covered in Chapter 5 of this book, which offers a thorough review of the solutions to the Einstein eld equations that describe isolated
black holes, a description of the fundamental properties of black holes that are independent of the details of any particular solution, and an introduction to the four
laws of black-hole mechanics. In the next paragraphs I outline the material covered
in the other chapters, and describe the connections with the theory of black holes.
The most important aspect of black-hole spacetimes is that they contain an event
horizon, a null hypersurface that marks the boundary of the black hole and shields
external observers from events going on inside. On this hypersurface there runs a
network (or congruence) of non-intersecting null geodesics; these are called the
null generators of the event horizon. To understand the behaviour of the horizon as
a whole it proves necessary to understand how the generators themselves behave,
and in Chapter 2 of this book we develop the relevant techniques. The description of congruences is concerned with the motion of nearby geodesics relative to a
given reference geodesic; this motion is described by a deviation vector that lives
in a space orthogonal to the tangent vector of the reference geodesic. This transverse space is easy to construct when the geodesics are timelike, but the case of
null geodesics is subtle. This has to do with the fact that the transverse space is then
two-dimensional the null vector tangent to the generators is orthogonal to itself
and this direction must be explicitly removed from the transverse space. I show
how this is done in Chapter 2. While null congruences are treated in other textbooks (most notably in Wald), the student is likely to nd my presentation (which
I have adapted from Carter (1979)) better suited for practical computations. While
Chapter 2 is concerned mostly with congruences of null geodesics, I present also
a complete treatment of the timelike case. There are two reasons for this. First,
this forms a necessary basis to understand the subtleties associated with the null
case. Second, and more importantly, the mathematical techniques involved in the

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Preface

xiii

study of congruences of timelike geodesics are used widely in the general relativity literature, most notably in the eld of mathematical cosmology. Another topic
covered in Chapter 2 is the standard energy conditions of general relativity; these
constraints on the stress-energy tensor ensure that under normal circumstances,
gravity acts as an attractive force it tends to focus geodesics. Energy conditions
appear in most theorems governing the behaviour of black holes.
Many quantities of interest in black-hole physics are dened by integration over
the event horizon. An obvious example is the holes surface area. Another example
is the gain in mass of an accreting black hole; this is obtained by integrating a
certain component of the accreting materials stress-energy tensor over the event
horizon. These integrations require techniques that are introduced in Chapter 3 of
this book. In particular, we shall need a notion of surface element on the event horizon. If the horizon were a timelike or a spacelike hypersurface, the construction
of a surface element would pose no particular challenge, but once again there are
interesting subtleties associated with the null case. I provide a complete treatment
of these issues in Chapter 3. I believe that my presentation is more systematic,
and more practical, than what can be found in the popular textbooks. Other topics
covered in Chapter 3 include the initial-value problem of general relativity (which
involves the induced metric and extrinsic curvature of a spacelike hypersurface)
and the DarmoisLanczosIsraelBarrab`es formalism for junction conditions and
thin shells (which constrains the possible discontinuities in the induced metric and
extrinsic curvature). The initial-value problem is discussed at a much deeper level
in Wald, but I felt it was important to include this material here: it provides a useful
illustration of the physical meaning of the extrinsic curvature, an object that plays
an important role in Chapter 4 of this book. Junction conditions and thin shells, on
the other hand, are not covered adequately in any textbook, in spite of the fact that
the DarmoisLanczosIsraelBarrab`es formalism is used very widely in the literature. (Junction conditions and thin shells are touched upon in Misner, Thorne, and
Wheeler, but I nd that their treatment is too brief to do justice to the formalism.)
Among the most important quantities characterizing black holes are their mass
and angular momentum, and the question arises as to how the mass and angular
momentum of an isolated body are to be dened in general relativity. I nd that
the most compelling denitions come from the gravitational Hamiltonian, whose
value for a given solution to the Einstein eld equations depends on a speciable
vector eld. If this vector corresponds to a time translation at spatial innity, then
the Hamiltonian gives the total mass of the spacetime; if, on the other hand, the
vector corresponds to an asymptotic rotation about an axis, then the Hamiltonian
gives the spacetimes total angular momentum in the direction of this axis. This
connection is both deep and beautiful, and in this book it forms the starting point
for dening black-hole mass and angular momentum. Chapter 4 is devoted to a

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Preface

systematic treatment of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of general

relativity, with the goal in mind of arriving at well-motivated notions of mass and
angular momentum. What sets my presentation apart from what can be found in
other texts, including Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler and Wald, is that I pay careful
attention to the boundary terms that must be included in the gravitational action
to produce a well-posed variational principle. These boundary terms have been
around for a very long time, but it is only fairly recently that their importance has
been fully recognized. In particular, they are directly involved in dening the mass
and angular momentum of an asymptotically-at spacetime.
To set the stage, I review the fundamentals of differential geometry in Chapter 1
of this book. The collection of topics is standard: vectors and tensors, covariant
differentiation, geodesics, Lie differentiation, Killing vectors, curvature tensors,
geodesic deviation, and some others. The goal here is not to provide an introduction to these topics; although some may be new, I assume that for the most part, the
student will have encountered them before (in an introductory course at the level
of Schutz, for example). Instead, my objective with this chapter is to refresh the
students memory and establish the style and notation that I adopt throughout the
book.
As I have indicated, I have tried to present this material as a unied whole,
using a consistent notation and maintaining a fairly uniform level of precision and
rigour. While I have tried to be somewhat precise and rigourous, I have deliberately
avoided putting too much emphasis on this. My attitude is that it is more important
to illustrate how a theorem works and can be used in a practical situation, than
it is to provide all the ne print that goes into a rigourous proof. The proofs that
I do provide are informal; they may sometimes be incomplete, but they should
sufce to convince the student that the theorems are true. They may, however,
leave the student wanting for more; in this case I shall have to refer her to a more
authoritative text such as Wald.
I have also indicated that I wanted this book to be practical I hope that after
studying this book, the student will be able to use what she has learned to compute
things of direct relevance to her. To encourage this I have inserted a large number
of examples within the text. I also provide problem sets at the end of each chapter;
here the students understanding will be put to the test. The problems vary in difculty, from the plug-and-grind type designed to increase the students familiarity
with a new technique, to the more challenging type that is supposed to make the
student think. Some of the problems require a large amount of tensor algebra, and
I strongly advise the student to let the computer perform the most routine operations. (My favourite package for tensor manipulations is GRTensorII, developed
by Peter Musgrave, Denis Pollney and Kayll Lake. It is available free of charge at
http://grtensor.phy.queensu.ca/.)

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Preface

xv

Early versions of this book have been used by graduate students who took my
course over the years. A number of them have expressed great praise by involving
some of the techniques covered here in their own research. This is extraordinarily
gratifying, and it has convinced me that a wider release of this book might do more
than just service my vanity. A number of students have carefully checked through
the manuscript for errors (typographical or otherwise), and some have made useful
suggestions for improvements. For this I thank Daniel Bruni, Sean Crowe, Luis de
Menezes, Paul Kobak, Karl Martel, Peter Martin, Sanjeev Seahra and Katrin Rohlf.
Of course, I accept full responsibility for whatever errors remain. The reader is
invited to report any error she may nd (poisson@physics.uoguelph.ca), and can
look up those already reported at http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/poisson/toolkit/.
This book is dedicated to Werner Israel, my teacher, mentor, and friend, whose
inuence on me, both as a relativist and as a human being, runs deep. His inuence,
I trust, will be felt throughout the book. Each time I started the elaboration of a new
topic I would ask myself: How would Werner approach this? I do not believe
that the answers I came up with would come even close to his level of pedagogical
excellence, but there is no doubt that to ask the question has made me try harder to
reach that level.

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