Summary of session A1: exact solutions and their interpretation

Abstract

I report on the communications and posters presented on exact solutions and their interpretation at the GRG18 Conference, Sydney.PACS numbers: 04.20.Jb Structure of workshop A1Workshop A1 received the largest number of submissions in the 18th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held in Sydney, July 2007. This continues a pattern of similar successes in previous GRG conferences. The organization allocated a total of 4 different 2-hour sessions with oral presentations, plus the posters, in order to accommodate the submissions that had been selected. Two of the oral sessions were held on the first conference day (Monday) and the other two on the fourth (Thursday). The total number of oral presentations was 26.Each 2-hour oral session was devoted to a different subject. To that end, the speakers were grouped by the affinity of their submission contents. Thus, the first session dealt with classical work on exact solutions, where traditional concepts such as multipole moments, symmetries, Bianchi models, and the Kerr, Szekeres, or Robinson-Trautman solutions were discussed. The second 2-hour session concerned gravitational collapse, spherical symmetry, and charge. The third session concentrated on the important topic of black holes, not only in four but also in higher dimensions, so that black rings and their avatars were an important part of the session. This is a subject of increasing popularity and interest, as many of the traditional properties of 4-dimensional black holes simply do not hold in higher dimensions, and superstring theory may provide some understanding of the underlying properties of black hole thermodynamics. Finally, there was a miscellanea in the last session, including topics not covered by, as well as as talks that could not be fitted in, the previous sessions.In what follows, I report on each of these sessions separately.