The possibility of a nonzero graviton mass has been widely pursued in the literature. In this work we investigate a black hole solution in massive gravity with a degenerate fiducial metric often used in the literature. We find that the end state of Hawking evaporation leads to black hole remnant, which could help to ameliorate the information paradox. We prove that these remnants only exist in anti-de Sitter spacetime. Nevertheless, we speculate on their possible relevance to our Universe as dark matter candidate, in view of the possibility that our Universe could be inherently anti-de Sitter-like, with a transient accelerated expansion phase.

There are some examples in the literature, in which despite the fact that the underlying theory or model does not impose a lower bound on the size of black holes, the final temperature under Hawking evaporation is nevertheless finite and nonzero. We show that under some loose conditions, the black hole is necessarily an effective remnant, in the sense that its evaporation time is infinite. That is, the final state that there is nonzero finite temperature despite having no black hole remaining cannot be realized. We discuss the limitations, subtleties, and the implications of this result, which is reminiscent of the third law of black hole thermodynamics, but with the roles of temperature and size interchanged. We therefore refer to our result as the complementary third law for black hole thermodynamics.

The Smarr relation plays an important role in black hole thermodynamics. It is often claimed that the Smarr relation can be written down simply by observing the scaling behavior of the various thermodynamical quantities. We point out that this is not necessarily so in the presence of dimensionful coupling constants, and discuss the issues involving the identification of thermodynamical variables.

It was previously argued that generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) with a positive parameter removes the Chandrasekhar limit. One way to restore the limit is by taking the GUP parameter to be negative. In this work we discuss an alternative method that achieves the same effect: by including a cosmological constant term in the GUP (known as extended GUP in the literature). We show that an arbitrarily small but nonzero cosmological constant can restore the Chandrasekhar limit. We also remark that if the extended GUP is correct, then the existence of white dwarfs gives an upper bound for the cosmological constant, which-while still large compared to observation-is approximately 86 orders of magnitude smaller than the natural scale.

We show that thermodynamics for an asymptotically flat Schwarzschild black hole leads to a force of magnitude c(4)/(2G). This remains true if one considers the simplest form of correction due to the generalized uncertainty principle. We comment on the maximum force conjecture, the subtleties involved, as well as the discrepancies with previous results in the literature.

The physics of tunneling from one spacetime to another is often understood in terms of instantons. For some instantons, it was recently shown in the literature that there are two complementary interpretations for their analytic continuations. Dubbed something-to-something and nothing-to-something interpretations, respectively, the former involves situation in which the initial and final hypersurfaces are connected by a Euclidean manifold, whereas the initial and final hypersurfaces in the latter case are not connected in such a way. We consider a de Sitter space with real projective space RP3 spatial sections, as was originally understood by de Sitter himself. This original version of de Sitter space has several advantages over the usual de Sitter space with S-3 spatial sections. In particular, the interpretation of the de Sitter entropy as entanglement entropy is much more natural. We discuss the subtleties involved in the tunneling of such a de Sitter space.

A new solution of a unitary moving mirror is found to produce finite energy and emit thermal radiation despite the absence of an acceleration horizon. In the limit that the mirror approaches the speed of light, the model corresponds to a black hole formed from the collapse of a null shell. For speeds less than light, the black hole correspondence, if it exists, is that of a remnant.

It was recently pointed out that if an absorbing boundary condition is imposed at infinity, an asymptotically anti-de Sitter Schwarzschild black hole with a spherical horizon takes only a finite amount of time to evaporate away even if its initial mass is arbitrarily large. We show that this is a rather generic property in AdS spacetimes: regardless of their horizon topologies, neutral AdS black holes in general relativity take about the same amount of time to evaporate down to the same size of order L, the AdS length scale. Our discussion focuses on the case in which the black hole has toral event horizon. A brief comment is made on the hyperbolic case, i.e. for black holes with negatively curved horizons.

It has been shown in the literature that the event horizon of an asymptotically flat extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole is also a stable photon sphere. We further clarify this statement and give a general proof that this holds for a large class of static spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes with an extremal horizon. In contrast, in the Doran frame, an asymptotically flat extremal Kerr black hole has an unstable photon orbit on the equatorial plane of its horizon. In addition, we show that an asymptotically flat extremal Kerr-Newman black hole exhibits two equatorial photon orbits if a < M/2, one of which is on the extremal horizon in the Doran frame and is stable, whereas the second one outside the horizon is unstable. For a > M/2, there is only one equatorial photon orbit, located on the extremal horizon, and it is unstable. There can be no photon orbit on the horizon of a non-extremal Kerr-Newman black hole.

In the firewall proposal, it is assumed that the firewall lies near the event horizon and should not be observable except by infalling observers, who are presumably terminated at the firewall. However, if the firewall is located near where the horizon would have been, based on the spacetime evolution up to that time, later quantum fluctuations of the Hawking emission rate can cause the teleological event horizon to have migrated to the inside of the firewall location, rendering the firewall naked. In principle, the firewall can be arbitrarily far outside the horizon. This casts doubt about the notion that firewalls are the most conservative solution to the information loss paradox.