We consider the static charged black hole bomb system, originally designed for a (uncharged) rotating superradiant system by Press and Teukolsky. A charged scalar field confined in a Minkowski cavity with a Maxwell gauge field has a quantized spectrum of normal modes that can fit inside the box. Back-reacting non-linearly these normal modes, we find the hairy solitons, a.k.a boson stars (depending on the chosen U(1) gauge), of the theory. The scalar condensate is totally confined inside the box and, outside it, we have the Reissner-Nordström solution. The Israel junction conditions at the box surface layer determine the stress tensor that the box must have to confine the scalar hair. Some of these horizonless hairy solutions exist for any value of the scalar field charge and not only above the natural critical charges of the theory (namely, the critical charges for the onset of the near-horizon and superradiant instabilities of the Reissner-Nordström black hole). However, the ground state solutions have a non-trivial intricate phase diagram with a main and a secondary family of solitons (some with a Chandrasekhar mass limit but others without) and there are a third and a fourth critical scalar field charges where the soliton spectra changes radically. Most of these intricate properties are not captured by a higher order perturbative analysis of the problem where we simply back-react a normal mode of the system.

Summary

Fermions scattering on a black hole background cannot develop an instability sourced by superradiance. However, in a global (or planar) AdS 4-Reissner-Nordström background fermions can violate the AdS 2 fermionic mass stability bound as measured by a near horizon observer at zero temperature. This suggests that AdS-Reissner-Nordström black holes might still be unstable to Dirac perturbations. Motivated by this observation we search for linear mode instabilities of Dirac fields in these backgrounds but find none. This is in contrast with the scalar field case, where a violation of the near-horizon Breitenlöhner-Freedman stability bound in the AdS-Reissner-Nordström background triggers the already known scalar condensation near-horizon linear instability (in the planar limit this is Gubser's instability that initiated the holographic superconductor programme). We consider both the standard and alternative AdS/CFT quantizations (that preserve the conformal invariance of AdS). These are reflective boundary conditions that have vanishing energy flux at the asymptotic boundary.

Summary A randomised study of 381 women was carried out to compare the obstetric outcome after epidural analgesia maintained by an intermittent fop‐up regimen or with a continuous infusion. The two groups were well matched with respect to age, parity, mode of onset of labour and indication for epidural. Maintenance of epidural analgesia by continuous infusion resulted in a significantly decreased need for top‐up doses. A reduction in the incidence of hypotension, cardiotocographic evidence of intrapartum fetal hypoxia and Caesarean section was associated with this. It is concluded that the maintenance of epidural analgesia by continuous infusion is a safe and reliable method and may be more advantageous and less labour intensive than the traditional intermittent regimen.