Brief review on higher spin black holes

Understand

We review some relevant results in the context of higher spin black holes in three-dimensional spacetimes, focusing on their asymptotic behaviour and thermodynamic properties.

• For simplicity, we mainly discuss the case of gravity nonminimally coupled to spin-3 fields, being nonperturbatively described by a Chern-Simons theory of two independent sl(3,R) gauge fields.
• Since the analysis is particularly transparent in the Hamiltonian formalism, we provide a concise discussion of their basic aspects in this context; and as a warming up exercise, we briefly analyze the asymptotic behaviour of pure gravity, as well as the BTZ black hole and its thermodynamics, exclusively in terms of gauge fields.
• The discussion is then extended to the case of black holes endowed with higher spin fields, briefly signaling the agreements and discrepancies found through different approaches.