title: Generic isolated horizons and their applications
abstract: The notion of isolated horizons is extended to allow for distortion and rotation. Space-times containing a black hole, itself in equilibrium but possibly surrounded by radiation, satisfy these conditions. The framework has three types of applications: (i) it provides new tools to extract physics from strong field geometry; (ii) it leads to a generalization of the zeroth and first laws of black hole mechanics and sheds new light on the "origin" of the first law; and (iii) it serves as a point of departure for black hole entropy calculations in nonperturbative quantum gravity.
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, 104 Davey, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ashtekar
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Beetle
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Dreyer
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fairhurst
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Krishnan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lewandowski
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wisniewski