The fuzzball proposal states that associated with a black hole of entropy S there are exp S horizon-free non-singular solutions that asymptotically look like the black hole but generically differ from the black hole up to the horizon scale. These solutions, the fuzzballs, are considered to be the black hole microstates while the original black hole represents the average description of the system. The purpose of this report is to review current evidence for the fuzzball proposal, emphasizing the use of AdS/CFT methods in developing and testing the proposal. In particular, we discuss the status of the proposal for 2 and 3 charge black holes in the D1-D5 system, presenting new derivations and streamlining the discussion of their properties. Results to date support the fuzzball proposal but further progress is likely to require going beyond the supergravity approximation and sharpening the definition of a "stringy fuzzball". We outline how the fuzzball proposal could resolve longstanding issues in black hole physics, such as Hawking radiation and information loss. Our emphasis throughout is on connecting different developments and identifying open problems and directions for future research.
We give an elementary review of black holes in string theory. We discuss BPS holes, the microscopic computation of entropy and the `fuzzball' picture of the black hole interior suggested by microstates of the 2-charge system.
We construct the first family of microstate geometries of near-extremal black holes, by placing metastable supertubes inside certain scaling supersymmetric smooth microstate geometries. These fuzzballs differ from the classical black hole solution macroscopically at the horizon scale, and for certain probes the fluctuations between various fuzzballs will be visible as thermal noise far away from the horizon. We discuss whether these fuzzballs appear to infalling observers as fuzzballs of fuzz or as fuzzballs of fire. The existence of these solutions suggests that the singularity of non-extrema…
The fuzzball construction resolves the black hole information paradox by making spacetime end just before the horizon is reached. But if there is no traditional horizon, then do we lose the elegant relations of black hole thermodynamics? Using an argument similar to modular invariance, we argue that the answer is no; the completeness of fuzzball states implies that the generic fuzzball indeed reproduces the thermal properties attributed to the traditional hole.
In this short note we explain the main idea of the work done in arXiv:0804.4487[hep-th] and arXiv:0812.2942[hep-th]. We present a family of black hole microstates, the bubbling solutions. We then explain how supertubes placed in such backgrounds have their entropy enhanced by the presence of the background dipole charges. This indicates this could account for a large amount in the entropy of the three charge black hole.
We investigate the recent black hole firewall argument. For a black hole in a typical state we argue that unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. An information-free horizon is thus inconsistent with unitary at every step of the evaporation process (in particular both before and after Page time). The required horizon-scale structure is manifest in the fuzzball proposal which provides a mechanism for holding up the structure. In this context we want to address the experience of an infalling observer and discuss the recen…
The black-hole information paradox provides one of the sharpest foci for the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity and has become the proving-ground of would-be theories of quantum gravity. String theory has made significant progress in resolving this paradox, and has led to the fuzzball and microstate geometry programs. The core principle of these programs is that horizons and singularities only arise if one tries to describe gravity using a theory that has too few degrees of freedom to resolve the physics. String theory has sufficiently many degrees of freedom and this na…
These lecture notes present an introduction to the fuzzball proposal and emission from the D1-D5 system which is geared to an audience of graduate students and others with little background in the subject. The presentation begins with a discussion of the Penrose process and Hawking radiation. The fuzzball proposal is then introduced, and the two- and three-charge systems are reviewed. In the three-charge case details are not discussed. A detailed discussion of emission calculations for D1-D5-P black holes and for certain non-extremal fuzzballs from both the gravity and CFT perspectives is incl…
The traditional black hole has a horizon, with a singularity inside the horizon. But actual microstates of black holes are `fuzzballs', with no horizon and a complex internal structure. We take the simplest hole in string theory -- the extremal 2-charge D1D5 hole -- and study a simple effect that is a consequence of this internal structure of the fuzzball. Suppose we have a NS1 string wrapping the compact circle of the fuzzball solution. In the traditional black hole solution this circle is directly tensored with the remaining directions, and does not shrink to zero size. Thus a part of the st…
We explore the viability of fuzzballs as candidate microstate geometries for the black hole, and their possible role in resolutions of the information paradox. We argue that if fuzzballs provide a description of black-hole microstates, then the typical fuzzball geometry can only differ significantly from the conventional black-hole geometry at a Planck-scale-distance from the horizon. However, precisely in this region, quantum fluctuations in the fuzzball geometry become large and the fuzzball geometry becomes unreliable. We verify these expectations through a detailed calculation of quantum e…
These lecture notes discuss various aspects of the fuzzball paradigm, microstate geometries, and their role in gravitational phenomenology. We briefly introduce the information paradox and discuss how the fuzzball paradigm aims to resolve it. Then, some important families of fuzzball solutions in supergravity, called microstate geometries, are explored: multi-centered bubbling geometries and superstrata. Finally, we will review some very recent developments of the phenomenology of fuzzballs and delineate the exciting opportunities as well as the limitations of studying fuzzballs as alternative…
The black hole information paradox is one of the most important issues in theoretical physics. We review some recent progress using string theory in understanding the nature of black hole microstates. For all cases where these microstates have been constructed, one finds that they are horizon sized `fuzzballs'. Most computations are for extremal states, but recently one has been able to study a special family of non-extremal microstates, and see `information carrying radiation' emerge from these gravity solutions. We discuss how the fuzzball picture can resolve the information paradox. We use …
The advent of gravitational waves and black hole imaging has opened a new window into probing the horizon scale of black holes. An important question is whether string theory results for black holes can predict interesting and observable features that current and future experiments can probe. In this article I review the budding and exciting research being done on understanding the possibilities of observing signals from fuzzballs, where black holes are replaced by string-theoretic horizon-scale microstructure. In order to be accessible to both string theorists and black hole phenomenologists,…
Black holes absorb any particle impinging with an impact parameter below a critical value. We show that 2- and 3-charge fuzzball geometries exhibit a similar trapping behaviour for a selected choice of the impact parameter of incoming massless particles. This suggests that the blackness property of black holes arises as a collective effect whereby each micro-state absorbs a specific channel.
In the fuzzball paradigm the information paradox is resolved because the black hole is replaced by an object with no horizon. One may therefore ask if observations can distinguish a traditional hole from a fuzzball. We find: (a) It is very difficult to reflect quanta off the surface of a fuzzball, mainly because geodesics starting near the horizon radius cannot escape to infinity unless their starting direction is very close to radial. (b) If infalling particles interact with the emerging radiation before they are engulfed by the horizon, then we say that we have a `firewall behavior'. We cons…
We study the physical properties of four-dimensional, string-theoretical, horizonless "fuzzball" geometries by imaging their shadows. Their microstructure traps light rays straying near the would-be horizon on long-lived, highly redshifted chaotic orbits. In fuzzballs sufficiently near the scaling limit this creates a shadow much like that of a black hole, while avoiding the paradoxes associated with an event horizon. Observations of the shadow size and residual glow can potentially discriminate between fuzzballs away from the scaling limit and alternative models of black compact objects.
Assume that there exists a fundamental theory of gravity which has a fundamental length scale and which is capable of explaining black hole evolution process fully in terms of fundamental microscopic degrees of freedom. The resultant evolution will clearly be unitary and will have no information loss. Carrying this assumption to its logical conclusion and, in particular, by considering the size of the region obtained by resolving the black hole singularity in such a theory, we arrive at a scenario very similar to that in Mathur's fuzz ball proposal where there is no horizon. We also comment on…
Within General Relativity, the unique stationary solution of an isolated black hole is the Kerr spacetime, which has a peculiar multipolar structure depending only on its mass and spin. We develop a general method to extract the multipole moments of arbitrary stationary spacetimes and apply it to a large family of horizonless microstate geometries. The latter can break the axial and equatorial symmetry of the Kerr metric and have a much richer multipolar structure, which provides a portal to constrain fuzzball models phenomenologically. We find numerical evidence that all multipole moments are…
We revisit the relation between fuzzball solutions and D1-D5 microstates. A consequence of the fact that the R ground states (in the usual basis) are eigenstates of the R-charge is that only neutral operators can have non-vanishing expectation values on these states. We compute the holographic 1-point functions of the fuzzball solutions and find that charged chiral primaries have non-zero expectation values, except when the curve characterizing the solution is circular. The non-zero vevs reflect the fact that a generic curve breaks R-symmetry completely. This implies that fuzzball solutions (e…
We examine an interesting set of recent proposals describing a `wormhole paradigm' for black holes. These proposals require that in some effective variables, semiclassical low-energy dynamics emerges at the horizon. We prove the `effective small corrections theorem' to show that such an effective horizon behavior is not compatible with the requirement that the black hole radiate like a piece of coal as seen from outside. This theorem thus concretizes the fact that the proposals within the wormhole paradigm require some nonlocality linking the hole and its distant radiation. We try to illustrat…
In the LLM bubbling geometries, we compute the entropies of black holes and estimate their "horizon" sizes from the fuzzball conjecture, based on coarse-graining on the gravity side. The differences of black hole microstates cannot be seen by classical observations. Conversely, by counting the possible deformations of the geometry which are not classically detectable, we can calculate the entropy. We carry out this method on the black holes of the LLM bubbling geometries, such as the superstar, and obtain the same result as was derived by coarse-graining directly on the CFT (fermion) side. Sec…
The black hole information paradox is resolved in string theory by a radical change in the picture of the hole: black hole microstates are horizon sized quantum gravity objects called `fuzzballs' instead of vacuum regions with a central singularity. The requirement of causality implies that the quantum gravity wavefunctional $Ψ$ has an important component not present in the semiclassical picture: virtual fuzzballs. The large mass $M$ of the fuzzballs would suppress their virtual fluctuations, but this suppression is compensated by the large number -- $Exp[S_{bek}(M)]$ -- of possible fuzzballs.…
It has been suggested by A. Sen that the entropy of two-charge supersymmetric bound states in string theory should be accounted for by adding the entropy of source-free horizonless supergravity solutions to the entropy associated with the horizons of small black holes. This would imply that the entropy arises differently depending on the duality frame: in the D1-D5 frame one would count source-free horizonless solutions, while in the NS1-P frame one would compute the area of a horizon. This might lead to the belief that the microstates are described by fuzzball solutions in the D1-D5 duality f…
We study the scattering of massless probes in the vicinity of the {\it photon-sphere} of asymptotically AdS black holes and horizon-free microstate geometries (fuzzballs). We find that these exhibit a chaotic behaviour characterised by exponentially large deviations of nearby trajectories. We compute the Lyapunov exponent $λ$ governing the exponential growth in $d$ dimensions and show that it is bounded from above by $λ_b = \sqrt{d{-}3}/2b_{\rm min}$ where $b_{\rm min}$ is the minimal impact parameter under which a massless particle is swallowed by the black hole or gets trapped in the fuzzbal…
The black hole information paradox has caused enormous confusion over four decades. But in recent years, the theorem of quantum strong-subaddditivity has sorted out the possible resolutions into three sharp categories: (A) No new physics at $r\gg l_p$; this necessarily implies remnants/information loss. A realization of remnants is given by a baby Universe attached near $r\sim 0$. (B) Violation of the `no-hair' theorem by nontrivial effects at the horizon $r\sim M$. This possibility is realized by fuzzballs in string theory, and gives unitary evaporation. (C) Having the vacuum at the horizon, …
We provide a fuzzball picture for Schwarzshild black holes, in which matters and energy consisting the hole are not positioned on the central point exclusively but oscillate around there in a serial of eigen-modes, each of which features a special level of binding degrees and are quantum mechanically possible to be measured outside the horizon. By listing these modes explicitly for holes as large as $6M_\mathrm{pl}$, we find that their number increases exponentially with the area. Basing on this picture, we present a simple but explicitly unitary derivation of hawking radiations.
At high energy densities, fivebranes are populated by a Hagedorn phase of so-called "little strings", whose statistical mechanics underlies black fivebrane thermodynamics. A particular limit of this phase yields BTZ black holes in $AdS_3$, leading us to the idea that in this context fuzzballs and highly excited little strings are one and the same. We explore these ideas through an analysis of D-brane probes of fivebrane supertube backgrounds. String theory dynamics on these backgrounds is described by an exactly solvable null-gauged WZW model. We develop the formalism of null gauging on worlds…
In the traditional picture of black holes Hawking radiation is created by pair creation from the vacuum at the horizon. In the fuzzball proposal, individual microstates do not have a horizon with the `vacuum' state in its vicinity. For a special family of non-extremal microstates it was recently found that emission occurs due to pair creation in an ergoregion, rather than at a horizon. In this paper we extend this result to a slightly larger class of microstates, again finding exact agreement between the emission in the gravity picture and the CFT dual. We write down an expression for emission…
The black hole information paradox is really a combination of two problems: the causality paradox and the entanglement problem. The causality paradox arises because in the semiclassical approximation infalling matter gets causally trapped inside its own horizon; it is therefore unable to send its information back to infinity if we disallow propagation outside the light cone. We show how the causality paradox is resolved in the fuzzball paradigm. One needs to distinguish between two kinds of Rindler spaces: (a) Rindler space obtained by choosing accelerating coordinates in Minkowski space and (…
The idea of holography in gravity arose from the fact that the entropy of black holes is given by their surface area. The holography encountered in gauge/gravity duality has no such relation however; the boundary surface can be placed at an arbitrary location in AdS space and its area does not give the entropy of the bulk. The essential issues are also different between the two cases: in black holes we get Hawking radiation from the `holographic surface' which leads to the information issue, while in gauge/gravity duality there is no such radiation from the boundary surface. To resolve the inf…
We construct a model which illustrates the conjecture of fuzzball complementarity. In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy $E\sim T$. But quanta with $E\gg T$ impinging on the fuzzball create large collective excitations of the fuzzball surface. The dynamics of such excitations must be studied as an evolution in superspace, the space of all fuzzball solution $|F_i\rangle$. The states in this superspace are arranged in a hierarchy of `complexity'. We argue that evolution towards higher complexity ma…
We comment on a recent paper of Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully who argue against black hole complementarity based on the claim that an infalling observer 'burns' as he approaches the horizon. We show that in fact measurements made by an infalling observer outside the horizon are statistically identical for the cases of vacuum at the horizon and radiation emerging from a stretched horizon. This forces us to follow the dynamics all the way to the horizon, where we need to know the details of Planck scale physics. We note that in string theory the fuzzball structure of microstates does no…
We consider a black hole with a stretched horizon as a toy model for a fuzzball microstate. The stretched horizon provides a cut-off, and therefore one can determine the normal (as opposed to quasi-normal) modes of a probe scalar in this geometry. For the BTZ black hole, we compute these as a function of the level $n$ and the angular quantum number $J$. Conventional level repulsion is absent in this system, and yet we find that the Spectral Form Factor (SFF) shows clear evidence for a dip-ramp-plateau structure with a linear ramp of slope $\sim 1$ on a log-log plot, with or without ensemble av…
We extend and refine a general method to extract the multipole moments of arbitrary stationary spacetimes and apply it to the study of a large family of regular horizonless solutions to $ {\cal N}{\,=\,}2$ four-dimensional supergravity coupled to four Abelian gauge fields. These microstate geometries can carry angular momentum and have a much richer multipolar structure than the Kerr black hole. In particular they break the axial and equatorial symmetry, giving rise to a large number of nontrivial multipole moments. After studying some analytical examples, we explore the four-dimensional param…
Recently, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) have suggested a Gedankenexperiment to test black hole complementarity. They claim that the postulates of black hole complementarity are mutually inconsistent and choose to give up the "absence of drama" for an infalling observer. According to them the black hole is shielded by a firewall no later than Page time. This has generated some controversy. We find that an interesting picture emerges when we take into account objections from the advocates of fuzzballs. We reformulate AMPS' Gedankenexperiment in the decoherence picture of quantum …
String theory suggests that black hole microstates are quantum, horizon sized `fuzzballs', rather than smooth geometries with horizon. Radiation from fuzzballs can carry information and does not lead to information loss. But if we let a shell of matter collapse then it creates a horizon, and it seems that subsequent radiation will lead to information loss. We argue that the resolution to this problem is that the shell can tunnel to the fuzzball configurations. The amplitude for tunneling is small because we are relating two macroscopically different configurations, but the number of states tha…
It has been conjectured that the dual of the eternal black hole in AdS is two entangled but disconnected CFTs. We show that the entanglement created by the process of Hawking radiation creates several challenges for this conjecture. The nature of fuzzball states suggests a different picture, where the dual to two entangled CFTs is two entangled but disconnected spacetimes. We argue for a process of `quick tunneling' where the Einstein-Rosen bridge of the eternal hole tunnels rapidly into fuzzball states, preventing the existence of the eternal hole as a semiclassical spacetime. The regions beh…
Deep conceptual problems associated with classical black holes can be addressed in string theory by the ``fuzzball'' paradigm, which provides a microscopic description of a black hole in terms of a thermodynamically large number of regular, horizonless, geometries with much less symmetry than the corresponding black hole. Motivated by the tantalizing possibility to observe quantum gravity signatures near astrophysical compact objects in this scenario, we perform the first $3+1$ numerical simulations of a scalar field propagating on a large class of multicenter geometries with no spatial isomet…
For extremal black holes the fuzzball conjecture says that the throat of the geometry ends in a quantum `fuzz', instead of being infinite in length with a horizon at the end. For the D1-D5 system we consider a family of sub-ensembles of states, and find that in each case the boundary area of the fuzzball satisfies a Bekenstein type relation with the entropy enclosed. We suggest a relation between the `capped throat' structure of microstate geometries and the fact that the extremal hole was found to have zero entropy in some gravity computations. We examine quantum corrections including string …
The black-hole information paradox provides a stringent test of would-be theories of quantum gravity. String theory has made significant progress toward a resolution of this paradox, and has led to the fuzzball and microstate geometry programs. The central thesis of these programs is that only string theory has sufficiently many degrees of freedom to resolve black-hole microstructure, and that horizons and singularities are artifacts of attempting to describe gravity using a theory that has too few degrees of freedom to resolve the physics. Fuzzballs and microstate geometries recast black hole…
We examine the stability of the nonextremal D1-D5-P black hole solutions. In particular, we look for the appearance of a superradiant instability for the spinning black holes but we find no evidence of such an instability. We compare this situation with that for the smooth soliton geometries, which were recently observed to suffer from an ergoregion instability, and consider the implications for the fuzzball proposal.
In recent years we have come to understand how the information paradox is resolved in string theory. The huge entropy $S_{bek}={A\over 4G}$ of black holes is realized by an explicit set of horizon sized `fuzzball' wavefunctions. The wavefunction of a collapsing shell spreads relatively quickly over this large phase space of states, invalidating the classical black hole geometry the shell would have created. We argue that a related effect may occur in the early Universe. When matter is crushed to high densities we can access a similarly large phase space of gravitational `fuzzball' solutions. W…
We exploit the recently proposed correspondence between gravitational perturbations and quantum Seiberg-Witten curves to compute the spectrum of quasi-normal modes of asymptotically flat Kerr Newman black holes and establish detailed gauge/gravity dictionaries for a large class of black holes, D-branes and fuzzballs in diverse dimensions. QNM frequencies obtained from the quantum periods of $SU(2)$ ${\cal N}=2$ SYM with $N_f=3$ flavours are compared against numerical results, WKB (eikonal) approximation and geodetic motion showing remarkable agreement. Starting from the master example relating…
We quantize the space of 2-charge fuzzballs in IIB supergravity on $K3$. The resulting entropy precisely matches the D1-D5 black hole entropy, including a specific numerical coefficient. A partial match (ie., a smaller coefficient) was found by Rychkov a decade ago using the Lunin-Mathur subclass of solutions - we use a simple observation to generalize his approach to the full moduli space of $K3$ fuzzballs, filling a small gap in the literature.
We discuss the existence of scaling solutions for multicenter black hole configurations. One of the central results is the equivalence between the existence of two centered scaling solutions and the holographic entropy bound. This equivalence (and another one) are proved rigorously at the end of the paper, and allow to simplify the process counting of certain (fuzzball-like) contributions to black hole entropy.
It is generally believed that the eternal AdS black hole is dual to two conformal field theories with compact spatial sections that are together in a thermofield double state. We argue that this proposal is incorrect, and by extension so are the "entanglement=geometry" proposal of Van Raamsdonk and "ER=EPR" proposal of Maldacena and Susskind. We show that in the bulk there is an interaction needed between the two halves of the Hilbert space for connectivity across the horizon; however, there is no such interaction between the CFTs. This rules out the possibility of the dual to the CFTs being t…
We study the dynamics of supertubes in smooth bubbling geometries with three charges and three dipole charges that can describe black holes, black rings and their microstates. We find the supertube Hamiltonian in these backgrounds and show that there exist metastable supertube configurations, that can decay into supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric ones via brane-flux annihilation. We also find stable non-supersymmetric configurations. Both the metastable and the stable non-supersymmetric configuration are expected to describe microstate geometries for non-extremal black holes, and we discuss…
We describe static, brane--like, solutions to vacuum Einstein's equations in D = n + m + 2 dimensional spacetime with m \ge 2 and n \ge 1. These solutions have positive ADM mass but no horizon. The curvature invariants are finite everywhere except at r = 0 where r is the radial coordinate in the m + 1 dimensional space. The presence of n \ge 1 extra dimensions is crucial for these properties. Such solutions may be naturally anticipated if Mathur's fuzzball proposal for black holes is correct.
We consider three fundamental issues in quantum gravity: (a) the black hole information paradox (b) the unboundedness of entropy that can be stored inside a black hole horizon (c) the relation between the black hole horizon and the cosmological horizon. With help from the small corrections theorem, we convert each of these issues into a sharp conflict. We then argue that all three conflicts can be resolved by the following hypothesis: {\it the vacuum wavefunctional of quantum gravity contains a `vecro' component made of virtual fluctuations of configurations of the same type that arise in the …
Two seemingly distinct notions regarding black holes have captured the imagination of theoretical physicists over the past decade: First, black holes are conjectured to be fast scramblers of information, a notion that is further supported through connections to quantum chaos and decay of mutual information via AdS/CFT holography. Second, black hole information paradox has motivated exotic quantum structure near horizons of black holes (e.g., gravastars, fuzzballs, or firewalls) that may manifest themselves through delayed gravitational wave echoes in the aftermath of black hole formation or me…
We study the microstates of the ``small'' black hole in the $\half$-BPS sector of AdS$_5\times S^5$, the superstar of Myers and Tafjord, using the powerful holographic description provided by LLM. The system demonstrates the inherently statistical nature of black holes, with the geometry of Myer and Tafjord emerging only after averaging over an ensemble of geometries. The individual microstate geometries differ in the highly non-trivial topology of a quantum foam at their core, and the entropy can be understood as a partition of $N$ units of flux among 5-cycles, as required by flux quantizatio…
We describe the experience of an observer falling into a black hole using the AdS/CFT correspondence. In order to do this, we reconstruct the local bulk operators measured by the observer along his trajectory outside the black hole. We then extend our construction beyond the black hole horizon. We show that this is possible because of an effective doubling of the observables in the boundary theory, when it is in a pure state that is close to the thermal state. Our construction allows us to rephrase questions about information-loss and the structure of the metric at the horizon in terms of more…
It has been argued that small corrections to evolution arising from non-geometric effects can resolve the information paradox. We can get such effects, for example, from subleading saddle points in the Euclidean path integral. But an inequality derived in 2009 using strong sub-additivity showed that such corrections {\it cannot} solve the problem. As a result we sharpen the original Hawking puzzle: we must either have (A) new (nonlocal) physics or (B) construct hair at the horizon. We get correspondingly different approaches to resolving the AMPS puzzle. Traditional complementarity assumes (A)…
We compute the albedo (or reflectivity) of electromagnetic waves off the electron-positron Hawking plasma that surrounds the horizon of a Quantum Black Hole. We adopt the "modified firewall conjecture" for fuzzballs [arXiv:hep-th/0502050,arXiv:1711.01617], where we consider significant electromagnetic interaction around the horizon. While prior work has treated this problem as an electron-photon scattering process, we find that the incoming quanta interact collectively with the fermionic excitations of the Hawking plasma at low energies. We derive this via two different methods: one using rela…
