A New Class of Accelerating Black Hole Solutions

We construct several new families of vacuum solutions that describe black holes in uniformly accelerated motion. They generalize the C-metric to the case where the energy density and tension of the strings that pull (or push) on the black holes are independent parameters. These strings create large curvatures near their axis and when they have infinite length they modify the asymptotic properties of the spacetime, but we discuss how these features can be dealt with physically, in particular in terms of `wiggly cosmic strings'. We comment on possible extensions, and extract lessons for the problem of finding higher-dimensional accelerating black hole solutions.