Black Holes

TL;DR

Townsend's Black Holes lecture notes survey classical and semiclassical black-hole physics, tracing gravitational collapse from white-dwarf limits to Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes and extending to charged and rotating black holes. The framework blends geodesic motion, conformal diagrams, and Killing horizons with the laws of black-hole mechanics, culminating in the Hawking temperature via Euclidean methods and the Unruh/Tolman relations. The work emphasizes global structure (Penrose diagrams, maximal analytic extensions) and conserved charges (ADM, Komar) that underpin mass, angular momentum, and energy extraction limits (Penrose process, superradiance). Overall, the notes connect stellar collapse, black-hole uniqueness, and quantum effects, highlighting how classical GR plus quantum field theory yields a thermodynamic, radiative picture of black holes with far-reaching implications for astrophysics and fundamental physics.

Abstract

Lecture notes for a 'Part III' course 'Black Holes' given in DAMTP, Cambridge. The course covers some of the developments in Black Hole physics of the 1960s and 1970s.