Title: Gauge/Gravity correspondence and black hole attractors in various dimensions
Description: This thesis investigates several topics on Gauge/Gravity correspondence and black hole attractors in various dimensions. The first chapter contains a brief review and summary of main results. Chapters 2 and 3 aim at a microscopic description of black objects in five dimensions. Chapter 2 studies higher-derivative corrections for 5D black rings and spinning black holes. It shows that certain R 2 terms found in Calabi-Yau compactifications of M-theory yield macroscopic corrections to the entropies that match the microscopic corrections. Chapter 3 constructs probe brane configurations that preserve half of the enhanced near-horizon supersymmetry of 5D spinning black holes, whose near-horizon geometry is squashed AdS 2 × S 3 . There are supersymmetric zero-brane probes stabilized by orbital angular momentum on S 3 and one-brane probes with momentum and winding around a U (1) L × U (1) R torus in S 3 . Chapter 4 constructs and analyzes generic single-centered and multi-centered black hole attractor solutions in various four-dimensional models which, after Kaluza-Klein reduction, admit a description in terms of 3D gravity coupled to a sigma model whose target space is symmetric coset space. The solutions correspond to certain nilpotent generators of the coset algebra. The non-BPS black hole attractors are found to be drastically different from their BPS counterparts. Chapter 5 examines three-dimensional topologically massive gravity with negative cosmological constant in asymptotically AdS 3 spacetimes.

It proves that the theory is unitary and stable only at a special value of Chern-Simons coupling, where the theory becomes chiral. This suggests the existence of a stable, consistent quantum gravity theory at the chiral point which is dual to a holomorphic boundary CFT 2 . Finally, Chapter 6 studies the two-dimensional [Special characters omitted.] = 1 critical string theory with a linear dilaton background. It constructs time-dependent boundary state solutions that correspond to D0-branes falling toward the Liouville wall. It also shows that there exist four types of stable, falling D0-branes (two branes and two anti-branes) in Type 0A projection and two unstable ones in Type 0B projection.