In dimensions higher than four, black holes exhibit a much richer dynamics, and qualitatively new phenomena emerge. I will review their properties and show how deviations from the familiar four-dimensional behavior can be traced back to the emergence of widely separated scales in the system. We will see that those are the regimes in which instabilities can arise and the black hole behaves effectively as a fluid that lives on a dynamical world volume. The resulting blackfold description then allows to gain new insights into the phases of higher dimensional black holes.

Ecole Polytechnique et LPT Orsay