2001/05/31 by Gary T. Horowitz, Kengo Maeda · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.87.131301
published as Phys.Rev.Lett. 87 (2001) 131301 · 11 pages, v2: few clarifications and references added
arxiv created 2001/06/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Gregory and Laflamme showed that certain nonextremal black strings (and p-branes) are unstable to linearized perturbations. It is widely believed that this instability will cause the black string horizon to classically pinch off and then quantum mechanically separate, resulting in higher dimensional black holes. We argue that this cannot happen. Under very mild assumptions, classical event horizons cannot pinch off. Instead, they settle down to new static black string solutions which are not translationally invariant along the string.