Generic isolated horizons and their applications

The notion of isolated horizons is extended to allow for distortion and rotation. Space-times containing a black hole, itself in equilibrium but possibly surrounded by radiation, satisfy these conditions. The framework has three types of applications: (i) it provides new tools to extract physics from strong field geometry; (ii) it leads to a generalization of the zeroth and first laws of black hole mechanics and sheds new light on the "origin" of the first law; and (iii) it serves as a point of departure for black hole entropy calculations in nonperturbative quantum gravity.