Paper detail

What is the Shape of a Black Hole?

A brief, and certainly not exhaustive, survey is provided of some recent results and conjectures in four and higher spacetime dimensions, such as the Hoop Conjecture, relating the geometry of event horizons to dynamical quantities such as the total energy or mass of the spacetime containng the black hole. As a measure of the size of a hoop one may take Birkhoff's invariant based on sweepouts by circles or higher dimensional analogues or one may take the length of the shortest non-trivial closed geodesic. Also discussed are whether one can hear the shape of a black hole and to what extent one may associate with it a volume.