We show that the linearization of all exact solutions of classical chiral gravity around the AdS3 vacuum have positive energy. Nonchiral and negative-energy solutions of the linearized equations are infrared divergent at second order, and so are removed from the spectrum. In other words, chirality is confined and the equations of motion have linearization instabilities. We prove that the only stationary, axially symmetric solutions of chiral gravity are BTZ black holes, which have positive energy. It is further shown that classical log gravity—the theory with logarithmically relaxed boundary conditions—has finite asymptotic symmetry generators but is not chiral and hence may be dual at the quantum level to a logarithmic conformal field theories (CFT). Moreover we show that log gravity contains chiral gravity within it as a decoupled charge superselection sector. We formally evaluate the Euclidean sum over geometries of chiral gravity and show that it gives precisely the holomorphic extremal CFT partition function. The modular invariance and integrality of the expansion coefficients of this partition function are consistent with the existence of an exact quantum theory of chiral gravity. We argue that the problem of quantizing chiral gravity is the holographic dual of the problem of constructing an extremal CFT, while quantizing log gravity is dual to the problem of constructing a logarithmic extremal CFT.

The superradiant scattering of a scalar field with frequency and angular momentum (ω, m) by a near-extreme Kerr black hole with mass and spin (M, J) was derived in the seventies by Starobinsky, Churilov, Press and Teukolsky. In this paper we show that for frequencies scaled to the superradiant bound the full functional dependence on (ω, m, M, J) of the scattering amplitudes is precisely reproduced by a dual two-dimensional conformal field theory in which the black hole corresponds to a specific thermal state and the scalar field to a specific operator. This striking agreement corroborates a conjectured Kerr/CFT correspondence.

Near-superradiant scattering of charged scalars and fermions by a near-extreme Kerr-Newman black hole and photons and gravitons by a near-extreme Kerr black hole are computed as certain Fourier transforms of correlators in a two-dimensional conformal field theory. The results agree with the classic spacetime calculations from the 1970s, thereby providing good evidence for a conjectured Kerr-Newman/CFT correspondence.

The presence of a massive scalar field near a Kerr black hole is known to produce instabilities associated with bound superradiant modes. In this paper we show that for massive fermions, rather than inducing an instability, the bound superradiant modes condense and form a Fermi sea which extends well outside the ergosphere. The shape of this Fermi sea in phase space and various other properties are analytically computed in the semiclassical WKB approximation. The low energy effective theory near the black hole is described by ripples in the Fermi surface. Expressions are derived for their dispersion relation and the effective force on particles which venture into the sea.

We show that the spinning magnetic one-brane in minimal five-dimensional supergravity admits a decoupling limit that interpolates smoothly between a self-dual null orbifold of AdS_3 \times S^2 and the near-horizon limit of the extremal Kerr black hole times a circle. We use this interpolating solution to understand the field theory dual to spinning M5 branes as a deformation of the Discrete Light Cone Quantized (DLCQ) Maldacena-Stominger-Witten (MSW) CFT. In particular, the conformal weights of the operators dual to the deformation around AdS_3 \times S^2 are calculated. We present pieces of evidence showing that a CFT dual to the four-dimensional extremal Kerr can be obtained from the deformed MSW CFT.