Developments in General Relativity: Black Hole Singularity and Beyond

At the 20-th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics there was a plenary talk devoted to the recent developments in classical Relativity. In that talk the problems of gravitational collapse, collisions of black holes, and of black holes as celestial bodies were discussed. But probably the problems of the internal structure of black holes are a real great challenge. In my talk I want to outline the recent achievements in our understanding of the nature of the singularity (and beyond!) inside a realistic rotating black hole. This presentation also addresses the following questions: Can we see what happens inside a black hole? Can a falling observer cross the singularity without being crushed? An answer to these questions is probably "yes".Comment: 13 page

Low-Temperature Decoherence of Qubit Coupled to Background Charges

We have found an exact expression for the decoherence rate of a Josephson charge qubit coupled to fluctuating background charges. At low temperatures $T$ the decoherence rate ${\Gamma}$ is linear in $T$ while at high temperatures it saturates in agreement with a known classical solution which, however, reached at surprisingly high $T$. In contrast to the classical picture, impurity states spread in a wide interval of energies ($\gg T$) may essentially contribute to ${\Gamma}$.Comment: Both figures are changed to illustrate a more generic case of impurity states spread in wide interval of energies. Some changes have been made to the abstract and the introductio