The near-horizon metric (NHM) refers to the near-horizon limit of the global metric of a black hole. NHMs play an important role in studying the geometry and topology of black holes, but are only well defined for extremal black holes. NHMs are expressed in Gaussian null coordinates, and one important property is that the dependence on the coordinate is fixed in the near-horizon limit.
The metric of extremal ReissnerâÂÂNordström black hole is
Taking the near-horizon limit
and then omitting the tildes, one obtains the near-horizon metric
The metric of extremal Kerr black hole () in BoyerâÂÂLindquist coordinates can be written in the following two enlightening forms,
where
Taking the near-horizon limit
and omitting the tildes, one obtains the near-horizon metric (this is also called extremal Kerr throat )
Extremal KerrâÂÂNewman black holes () are described by the metric
where
Taking the near-horizon transformation
and omitting the tildes, one obtains the NHM
In addition to the NHMs of extremal KerrâÂÂNewman family metrics discussed above, all stationary NHMs could be written in the form
<br />
where the metric functions are independent of the coordinate r, denotes the intrinsic metric of the horizon, and are isothermal coordinates on the horizon.
Remark: In Gaussian null coordinates, the black hole horizon corresponds to .