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This physicist is hunting for the biggest black hole in the universe

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Astronomers have recently started looking for black holes bigger than galaxies. Brian Lacki explains how these “stupendously large black holes” might be used by alien civilisations, and what makes them such an intriguing possibility

Gibbons et al. [arXiv:hep-th/0408217] found the energy $E$ of Kerr, anti-de Sitter black holes by integrating the first law of black hole thermodynamics. They found that $E$ corresponds to the Ashtekar, Magnon, Das (AMD) energy associated with an asymptotically nonrotating frame, whereas the AMD ``energy'' which I will call $F$ associated with an asymptotically rotating frame does not satisfy the first law. In Cvetič et al. [arXiv:1012.2888], the first law was extended by interpreting $E$ as an enthalpy and $Λ$ as being proportional to a pressure. The term conjugate to the pressure was then interpreted as the ``thermodynamic volume'' $V_{th}$. Associated with the first law (with varying pressure) is a Smarr relation for $E$. The Smarr relation for $F$ also exists, and the term conjugate to the pressure in that Smarr relation is the ``geometric volume'' $V_{geo}$, shown in [arXiv:1310.1935] to be equal to the vector volume $V_C$ of the black hole. To address why it is necessary to use $E$ rather than $F$ to have a viable first law but $V_C$ appears naturally in the Smarr relation associated with $F$ rather than $E$, I adapt Barnich and Compère [arXiv:gr-qc/0412029], by defining a conserved quantity $H^I_χ$ associated with Killing vector $χ$. $E$ and $F$ are given by $H^I_ξ$ and $H^I_β$ respectively where $ξ$ is asymptotically hypersurface-orthogonal and $β$ is proportional to the divergence of the Principal Conformal Killing, Yano tensor $\boldsymbol{h}$. I show that the first law will be satisfied by $H^I_χ$ if both $χ^a$ and the background anti-de Sitter metric have unvarying components, which holds for $ξ^a$ but not $β^a$, explaining why the first law works for $E$ but not $F$. I show that $V_C$ appears in the $β$-associated Smarr relation due to simplifications related to $\boldsymbol{h}$.