Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Black holes are one of the most remarkable predictions of Einstein's general relativity. Now widely accepted by the scientific community, most work has focussed on black holes in our familiar four spacetime dimensions. But in recent years, ideas in brane-world cosmology, string theory, and gauge/gravity duality have all motivated a study of black holes in more than four dimensions, with surprising results. In higher dimensions, black holes exist with exotic shapes and unusual dynamics. Edited by leading expert Gary Horowitz, this exciting book is the first devoted to this new field. The major discoveries are explained by the people who made them: RobMyers describes theMyers-Perry solutions that represent rotating black holes in higher dimensions; Ruth Gregory describes the Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings; and Juan Maldacena introduces gauge/gravity duality, the remarkable correspondence that relates a gravitational theory to nongravitational physics. There are two additional chapters on this duality describing how black holes can be used to describe relativistic fluids and aspects of condensed matter physics"-- Provided by publisher.