A Black-Hole Primer: Particles, Waves, Critical Phenomena and Superradiant Instabilities

Understand

These notes were prepared for a lecture on black holes delivered at the DPG Physics School "General Relativity @ 99" (Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany, September 2014).

• The common thread of the lecture is the relation between geodesic stability and black-hole perturbations in the geometric optics limit.
• Chapter 1 establishes notation and discusses a common misconception on Michell's "Newtonian black holes".
• Chapters 2 and 3 deal with particle dynamics and wave dynamics in black-hole spacetimes, respectively.