This dissertation covers two di erent but related topics: the construction of new black hole solutions and the study of the microscopic origin of black hole entropy. In the solution part, two di erent sets of new solutions are found. The rst concerns a Plebanski-Demianski type solution in the ve-dimensional pure Einstein gravity, and the second concerns a three-charge (two of which equal) two-rotation solution to the ve-dimensional maximal supergravity. Obtaining new and interesting black hole solutions is an important and challenging task in studying general relativity and its extensions. During the past decade, the solutions become even more important because they might nd applications in the study of the gauge/gravity duality, which is currently in the central stage of the quantum gravity research. The Kerr/CFT correspondence is a recently propose example of the gauge/gravity duality. In the entropy part, we explicitly show that the Kerr/CFT correspondence can be applied to all known extremal stationary and axisymmetric black holes. We improve over previous works in showing that this can be done in a general fashion, rather than testing di erent solutions case by case. This e ort makes it obvious that the common structure of the near horizon metric for all known extremal stationary and axisymmetric black holes is playing a key role in the success of the Kerr/CFT correspondence. The discussion is made possible by the identi cation of two general ans atze that cover all such known solutions.
