Rigidity of outer horizons and the topology of black holes

In a recent paper [13] the author and Rick Schoen obtained a generalization to higher dimensions of a classical result of Hawking concerning the topology of black holes. It was proved that, apart from certain exceptional circumstances, cross sections of the event horizon (in the stationary case) and outer apparent horizons (in the general case) in black hole spacetimes obeying the dominant energy condition are of positive Yamabe type. This implies many well-known restrictions on the topology, and is consistent with recent examples of five dimensional stationary black hole spacetimes with horizon topology S × S. In the present paper, we rule out in several natural scenarios, including the stationary case, the possibility of any such exceptional circumstances (which might have permitted, e.g., toroidal cross sections). This follows from the main result, which is a rigidity result for suitably outermost marginally outer trapped surfaces that are not of positive Yamabe type.