Some applications

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to present key applications of causality theory, as relevant to black-hole spacetimes. For this we need to introduce the concept of conformal completions, which is done in Section 3.1. We continue, in Section 3.2, with a review of the null splitting theorem of Galloway. Section 3.3 contains complete proofs of a few versions of the topological censorship theorems, which are otherwise scattered across the literature, and which play a basic role in understanding the topology of black holes. In Section 3.4 we review some key incompleteness theorems, also known under the name of singularity theorems. Section 3.5 is devoted to the presentation of a few versions of the area theorem, which is a cornerstones of ‘black-hole thermodynamics’. We close this chapter with a short discussion of the role played by causality theory when studying the wave equation.