The claim that the microstates of Schwarzschild black holes in perturbative string theory amount to the modes of long folded strings in the vicinity of its horizon is supported by more evidence.
We provide the first explicit proposal for all microstates of generic black holes in three dimensions (of Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli-type): black hole microstates, termed "horizon fluffs", are a particular class of near horizon soft hairs which have zero energy as measured by the horizon observer and cannot be distinguished by observers at finite distance from the horizon. These states are arranged in orbits of the two-dimensional conformal algebra associated with the asymptotic black hole geometry. We count these microstates using the Hardy-Ramanujan formula for the number of partitions of a …
In [1] the horizon fluffs proposal is put forward to identify microstates of generic non-extremal three-dimensional Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black holes. The proposal is that black hole microstates, which were dubbed as horizon fluffs, are states labelled by the conserved charges associated with non-trivial diffeomorphisms on the near horizon geometry and these states are not in the coadjoint orbits of the asymptotic Virasoro algebra at the Brown-Henneaux central charge, associated with the BTZ black holes. It is also known that AdS3 Einstein gravity has more general black hole solutio…
According to the horizon fluff proposal microstates of a generic black hole belong to a certain subset of near horizon soft hairs that cannot be extended beyond the near horizon region. In [1,2] it was shown how the horizon fluff proposal works for AdS3 black holes. In this work we clarify further this picture by showing that BTZ black hole microstates are in general among the coherent states in the Hilbert space associated with conic spaces or their Virasoro descendants, provided we impose a (Bohr-type) quantization condition on the angular deficit. Thus BTZ black holes may be viewed as conde…
Black holes whose near-horizon geometries are locally, but not necessarily globally, AdS$_3$ (three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space) are considered. Using the fact that quantum gravity on AdS$_3$ is a conformal field theory, we microscopically compute the black hole entropy from the asymptotic growth of states. Precise numerical agreement with the Bekenstein-Hawking area formula for the entropy is found. The result pertains to any consistent quantum theory of gravity, and does not use string theory or supersymmetry.
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…
Gravitational wave observations of the near-horizon region of black holes lend insight into the quantum nature of gravity. In particular, gravitational wave echoes have been identified as a potential signature of quantum gravity-inspired structure near the horizon. In this paper, we connect such observables to the language of black hole microstates in string theory and holography. To that end, we propose a toy model describing the AdS$_3$ near-horizon region of five-dimensional black holes, inspired by earlier work of Solodukhin. This model captures key features of recently constructed microst…
If one attempts to add momentum-carrying waves to a black string then the solution develops a singularity at the horizon; this is a manifestation of the 'no hair theorem' for black objects. However individual microstates of a black string do not have a horizon, and so the above theorem does not apply. We construct a perturbation that adds momentum to a family of microstates of the extremal D1-D5 string. This perturbation is analogous to the 'singleton' mode localized at the boundary of AdS; to leading order it is pure gauge in the AdS interior of the geometry.
We study microstates of the three dimensional black hole obtained by quantizing topologically non-trivial geometries behind the event horizon. In chiral gravity these states are found by quantizing the moduli space of bordered Riemann surfaces. In the semi-classical limit these microstates can be counted using intersection theory on the moduli space of punctured Riemann surfaces. We make a conjecture (supported by numerics) for the asymptotic behaviour of the relevant intersection numbers. The result is that the geometric microstates with fixed topology have an entropy which grows too slowly t…
We extend a recently derived higher-dimensional Cardy formula to include angular momenta, which we use to obtain the Bekensten-Hawking entropy of AdS black branes, compactified rotating branes, and large Schwarzschild/Kerr black holes. This is the natural generalization of Strominger's microscopic derivation of the BTZ black hole entropy to higher dimensions. We propose an extension to include $U(1)$ charge, which agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of large Reissner-Nordstrom/Kerr-Newman black holes at high temperature. We extend the results to arbitrary hyperscaling violation exponent…
We use mergers of microstates to obtain the first smooth horizonless microstate solutions corresponding to a BPS three-charge black hole with a classically large horizon area. These microstates have very long throats, that become infinite in the classical limit; nevertheless, their curvature is everywhere small. Having a classically-infinite throat makes these microstates very similar to the typical microstates of this black hole. A rough CFT analysis confirms this intuition, and indicates a possible class of dual CFT microstates. We also analyze the properties and the merging of microstates c…
Recent studies of asymptotic symmetries suggest, that a Hamiltonian phase space analysis in gravitational theories might be able to account for black hole microstates. In this context we explain, why the use of conventional Bondi fall-off conditions for the gravitational field is too restrictive in the presence of an event horizon. This implies an enhancement of physical degrees of freedom ($\mathcal{A}$-modes). They provide new gravitational hair and are responsible for black hole microstates. Using covariant phase space methods, for the example of a Schwarzschild black hole, we give a propos…
Attempts to find black hole microstates using the Hamiltonian phase space approach have been made on the Schwarzschild spacetime. Since the Schwarzschild spacetime is also in the larger family of the Kerr spacetimes, and both are asymptotically flat, the Kerr black hole is a good option for the method development. The Kerr black hole is a spinning one. We perform this analysis on the Kerr spacetime and we obtain promising results using the covariant phase space analysis. Although we have forced ourselves to use the Bondi fall-off conditions, we find the gauge degrees of freedom that could be g…
In hep-th/0412322, Gaiotto, Strominger and Yin proposed a novel way of counting black hole microstates by counting the quantum mechanical ground states of probe branes placed in the near-horizon black hole background. We discuss the generalization of this proposal to the case of two-charge D0-D4 `small' black holes in type IIA. We also describe the construction of BPS D-brane probes in the near-horizon region of the 2-charge D1-D5 system in type IIB. Based on hep-th/0505176, hep-th/0607150.
In this note, we explore the possibility that certain high-energy holographic CFT states correspond to black hole microstates with a geometrical behind-the-horizon region, modelled by a portion of a second asymptotic region terminating at an end-of-the-world (ETW) brane. We study the time-dependent physics of this behind-the-horizon region, whose ETW boundary geometry takes the form of a closed FRW spacetime. We show that in many cases, this behind-the-horizon physics can be probed directly by looking at the time dependence of entanglement entropy for sufficiently large spatial CFT subsystems.…
We construct probe solutions in the attractor background of the five-dimensional D1-D5-P black hole which represent near-horizon microstates in the limit of large D1-charge. These generalize the corresponding solutions considered by Gaiotto, Strominger and Yin for the 4-dimensional D0-D4 black hole. Using U-duality and a 4D-5D connection, we argue that the relevant configurations are bound states of D1-branes that have expanded through the Myers effect to form a Kaluza-Klein monopole wrapping the black hole horizon. We show that these branes experience a magnetic field on their moduli space, a…
We give a broad conceptual review of what we have learned about black holes and their microstate structure from the study of microstate geometries and their string theory limits. We draw upon general relativity, supergravity, string theory and holographic field theory to extract universal ideas and structural features that we expect to be important in resolving the information problem and understanding the microstate structure of Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes. In particular, we emphasize two conceptually and physically distinct ideas, with different underlying energy scales: a) the transi…
We present a one-function family of solutions to 4D vacuum Einstein equations. While all diffeomorphic to the same extremal Kerr black hole, they are labeled by well-defined conserved charges and are hence distinct geometries. We show that this family of solutions forms a phase space the symplectic structure of which is invariant under a $U(1)$ Kac-Moody algebra generated by currents $\mathbb{J}_n$ and Virasoro generators $\mathbb{L}_n$ with central charge six times angular momentum of the black hole. This symmetry algebra is well-defined everywhere in the spacetime, near the horizon or in the…
Microstate geometries in string theory replace the black-hole horizon with a smooth geometric "cap" at the horizon scale. In geometries constructed using superstratum technology, this cap has the somewhat surprising property that induces very large tidal deformations on infalling observers that are far away from it. We find that this large-distance amplification of the tidal effects is also present in horizonless microstate geometries constructed as bubbling solutions, but can be tamed by suitably arranging the bubbles to reduce the strength of some of the gravitational multipole moments. Howe…
We present a necessary and sufficient condition to falsify whether a Hawking radiation spectrum indicates unitary emission process or not from the perspective of information theory. With this condition, we show the precise values of Bekenstein-Hawking entropies for Schwarzschild black holes and Reissner-Nordström black holes can be calculated by counting the microstates of their Hawking radiations. In particular, for the extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole, its number of microstate and the corresponding entropy we obtain are found to be consistent with the string theory results. Our finding…
Collapsing shells form horizons, and when the curvature is small classical general relativity is believed to describe this process arbitrarily well. On the other hand, quantum information theory based (fuzzball/firewall) arguments suggest the existence of some structure at the black hole horizon. This structure can only form if classical general relativity stops being the correct description of the collapsing shell before it reaches the horizon size. We present strong evidence that classical general relativity can indeed break down prematurely, by explicitly computing the quantum tunneling amp…
In string theory, black-hole backgrounds are far from unique and there are large families of completely smooth, horizonless geometries with the same structure as a black hole from infinity down to the neighborhood of the black-hole horizon. These microstate geometries cap off in foam of topological bubbles. I review some of the recent progress in constructing these smooth horizonless geometries and discuss some of the physical implications.
We show that a class of four-dimensional rotating black holes allow five-dimensional embeddings as black rotating strings. Their near-horizon geometry factorizes locally as a product of the three-dimensional anti-deSitter space-time and a two-dimensional sphere (AdS_3 x S^2), with angular momentum encoded in the global space-time structure. Following the observation that the isometries on the AdS_3 space induce a two-dimensional (super)conformal field theory on the boundary, we reproduce the microscopic entropy with the correct dependence on the black hole angular momentum.
We construct the first smooth horizonless supergravity solutions that have two topologically-nontrivial three-cycles supported by flux, and that have the same mass and charges as a non-extremal D1-D5-P black hole. Our configurations are solutions to six-dimensional ungauged supergravity coupled to a tensor multiplet, and uplift to solutions of Type IIB supergravity. The solutions represent multi-center generalizations of the non-BPS solutions of Jejjala, Madden, Ross, and Titchener, which have over-rotating angular momenta. By adding an additional Gibbons-Hawking center, we succeed in lowering…
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…
We argue that the region behind the horizon of a one-sided black hole can be probed by an analogue of the double-trace deformation protocol of Gao-Jafferis-Wall. This is achieved via a deformation of the CFT Hamiltonian by a term of the form ${\cal O} \widetilde{\cal O}$, where $\widetilde{\cal O}$ denote the state-dependent "mirror operators". We argue that this deformation creates negative energy shockwaves in the bulk, which allow particles inside the horizon to escape and to get directly detected in the CFT. This provides evidence for the smoothness of the horizon of black holes dual to ty…
We show that an extremal Kerr black hole, appropriately lifted to M-theory, can be transformed to a Kaluza-Klein black hole in M-theory, or a D0-D6 charged black hole in string theory. Since all the microstates of the latter have recently been identified, one can exactly reproduce the entropy of an extremal Kerr black hole. We also show that the topology of the event horizon is not well defined in M-theory.
We construct a family of non-supersymmetric extremal black holes and their horizonless microstate geometries in four dimensions. The black holes can have finite angular momentum and an arbitrary charge-to-mass ratio, unlike their supersymmetric cousins. These features make them and their microstate geometries astrophysically relevant. Thus, they provide interesting prototypes to study deviations from Kerr solutions caused by new horizon-scale physics. In this paper, we compute the gravitational multipole structure of these solutions and compare them to Kerr black holes. The multipoles of the b…
Gravitational solutions involving shockwaves have attracted significant recent interest in the context of black holes and quantum chaos. Certain classes of supersymmetric two-charge black hole microstates are described by supergravity solutions containing shockwaves, that are horizonless and smooth away from the shockwave. These configurations have been used to describe how black hole microstates absorb and scramble perturbations. In this paper we construct the first family of asymptotically flat supersymmetric three-charge microstate solutions that contain shockwaves. We identify a family of …
The canonical quantization of a Schwarzschild black hole yields a picture of the black hole that is shown to be equivalent to a collection of oscillators whose density of levels is commensurate with that of the statistical bootstrap model. Energy eigenstates of definite parity exhibit the Bekenstein mass spectrum, $M \sim \sqrt{\cal N} M_p$, where ${\cal N} \in {\bf N}$. From the microcanonical ensemble, we derive the statistical entropy of the black hole by explicitly counting the microstates corresponding to a macrostate of fixed total energy.
We construct explicit examples of microstate geometries of four-dimensional black holes that lift to smooth horizon-free geometries in five dimensions. Solutions consist of half-BPS D-brane atoms distributed in $\mathbb{R}^3$. Charges and positions of the D-brane centers are constrained by the bubble equations and boundary conditions ensuring the regularity of the metric and the match with the black hole geometry. In the case of three centers, we find that the moduli spaces of solutions includes disjoint one-dimensional components of (generically) finite volume.
The entropy of a black hole can be obtained by counting states in loop quantum gravity. The dominant term depends on the Immirzi parameter involved in the quantization and is proportional to the area of the horizon, while there is a logarithmic correction with coefficient -1/2.
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…
We outline a systematic procedure to obtain horizonless microstate geometries that have the same charges as three-charge five-dimensional black holes with a macroscopically-large horizon area and an arbitrarily-small angular momentum. There are two routes through which such solutions can be constructed: using multi-center Gibbons-Hawking (GH) spaces or using superstratum technology. So far the only solutions corresponding to microstate geometries for black holes with no angular momentum have been obtained via superstrata, and multi-center Gibbons-Hawking spaces have been believed to give rise …
We show that extremal black holes have zero entropy by pointing out a simple fact: they are time-independent throughout the spacetime and correspond to a single classical microstate. We show that non-extremal black holes, including the Schwarzschild black hole, contain a region hidden behind the event horizon where all their Killing vectors are spacelike. This region is nonstationary and the time $t$ labels a continuous set of classical microstates, the phase space $[\,h_{ab}(t), P^{ab}(t)\,]$, where $h_{ab}$ is a three-metric induced on a spacelike hypersurface $Σ_t$ and $P^{ab}$ is its momen…
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 develop a new hybrid WKB technique to compute boundary-to-boundary scalar Green functions in asymptotically-AdS backgrounds in which the scalar wave equation is separable and is explicitly solvable in the asymptotic region. We apply this technique to a family of six-dimensional $\frac{1}{8}$-BPS asymptotically AdS$_3\,\times\,$S$^3$ horizonless geometries that have the same charges and angular momenta as a D1-D5-P black hole with a large horizon area. At large and intermediate distances, these geometries very closely approximate the extremal-BTZ$\,\times\,$S$^3$ geometry of the black hole, …
We find the first smooth microstate geometries with non-Abelian fields. The solutions constitute an extension of the BPS three-charge smooth microstates. These consist in general families of regular supersymmetric solutions with non-trivial topology, i.e. bubbles, of $\mathcal{N}=1$, $d=5$ Super-Einstein-Yang-Mills theory, having the asymptotic charges of a black hole or black ring but with no horizon. The non-Abelian fields make their presence at the very heart of the microstate structure: the physical size of the bubbles is affected by the non-Abelian topological charge they carry, which com…
A recent proposal that gravity theory is an emergent phenomenon also entails the possibility of photon decay near the Schwarzschild event horizon. We present a possible mechanism for such decay, which utilizes a dimensional reduction near the horizon.
Typical black hole microstates in AdS/CFT were recently conjectured to have a geometrical dual with a smooth horizon and a portion of a second asymptotic region. I consider the application of the holographic complexity conjectures to this geometry. The holographic calculation leads to divergent values for the complexity; I argue that this classical divergence is consistent with expectations for typical microstates.
A large class of extremal and near-extremal four dimensional black holes in M-theory feature near horizon geometries that contain three dimensional asymptotically anti-de Sitter spaces. Globally, these geometries are derived from AdS_3 by discrete identifications. The microstates of such black holes can be counted by exploiting the conformal symmetry induced on the anti-de Sitter boundary, and the result agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking area law. This approach, pioneered by Strominger, clarifies the physical nature of the black hole microstates. It also suggests that recent analyses of the r…
We show in this note that the Padmanabhan expression $E = a/2$ for the energy of the Schwarzschild and de Sitter spacetimes (a - the horizon radius) is also valid for the Rindler horizon, using an analogy with the electrostatic case.
We compute the full asymptotic symmetry group of black holes belonging to the same equivalence class of solutions within the Conformal Weyl Gravity formalism. We do this within an $AdS_2/CFT_1$ correspondence and by performing a Robinson-Wilczek two dimensional reduction, thus enabling the construction of an effective quantum theory of the remaining field content. The resulting energy momentum tensors generate asymptotic Virasoro algebras, to $s$-wave, with calculable central extensions. These centers in conjunction with their proper regularized lowest Virasoro eigen-modes yield the Bekenstein…
It is argued that the diffeomorphism on the horizontal sphere can be regarded as a nontrivial asymptotic isometry of the Schwarzschild black hole. We propose a new boundary condition of asymptotic metrics near the horizon and show that the condition admits the local time-shift and diffeomorphism on the horizon as the asymptotic symmetry.
Out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) that capture maximally chaotic properties of a black hole are determined by scattering processes near the horizon. This prompts the question to what extent OTOCs display chaotic behaviour in horizonless microstate geometries. This question is complicated by the fact that Lyapunov growth of OTOCs requires nonzero temperature, whereas constructions of microstate geometries have been mostly restricted to extremal black holes. In this paper, we compute OTOCs for a class of extremal black holes, namely maximally rotating BTZ black holes, and show that on averag…
This paper addresses a long standing problem, the counting of the microstates of supersymmetric asymptotically AdS black holes in terms of a holographically dual field theory. We focus on a class of asymptotically AdS$_4$ static black holes preserving two real supercharges which are dual to a topologically twisted deformation of the ABJM theory. We evaluate in the large $N$ limit the topologically twisted index of the ABJM theory and we show that it correctly reproduces the entropy of the AdS$_4$ black holes. An extremization of the index with respect to a set of chemical potentials is require…
We postulate a Planck scale horizon unit area, with no bits of information locally attached to it, connected but otherwise of free form, and let $n$ such geometric units compactly tile the black hole horizon. Associated with each topologically distinct tiling configuration is then a simple, connected, undirected, unlabeled, planar, chordal graph. The asymptotic enumeration of the corresponding integer sequence gives rise to the Bekenstein-Hawking area entropy formula, automatically accompanied by a proper logarithmic term, and fixes the size of the horizon unit area, thereby constituting a glo…
From the analysis of the near horizon geometry and supersymmetry algebra it has been argued that all the microstates of single centered BPS black holes with four unbroken supersymmetries carry zero angular momentum in the region of the moduli space where the black hole description is valid. A stronger form of the conjecture would be that the result holds for any sufficiently generic point in the moduli space. In this paper we set out to test this conjecture for a class of black hole microstates in type II string theory on $T^6$, represented by four stacks of D-branes wrapped on various cycles …
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 construct the first family of horizonless supergravity solutions that have the same mass, charges and angular momenta as general supersymmetric rotating D1-D5-P black holes in five dimensions. This family includes solutions with arbitrarily small angular momenta, deep within the regime of quantum numbers and couplings for which a large classical black hole exists. These geometries are well-approximated by the black-hole solution, and in particular exhibit the same near-horizon throat. Deep in this throat, the black-hole singularity is resolved into a smooth cap. We also identify the hologra…
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…
We assumed a stress tensor is necessary on the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole or on the Rindler horizon for the Israel matching conditions to be satisfied. We found the surface energy density $ρ_{s}$ is vanishing but the surface pressure $p_{s}$ equals $1/16πl$ in both cases, where $l$ is the proper distance from the horizon. The junction relations are applied both for $r =$ const. and $T =$ const. surfaces, with the same results for the surface parameters $ρ_{s}$ and $p_{s}$. We emphasize the nonstatic feature of the spacetimes beyond the corresponding horizons.
It is argued that free QFT can be defined on the event horizon of a Schwarzschild-like spacetime and that this theory is unitarily and algebraically equivalent to QFT in the bulk (near the horizon). Under that unitary equivalence the bulk hidden SL(2,R) symmetry found in a previous work becomes manifest on the event horizon, it being induced by a group of horizon diffeomorphisms. The class of generators of that group can be enlarged to include a full Virasoro algebra of fields which are defined on the event horizon. These generators have a quantum representation in QFT on the event horizon and…
Are there any degrees of freedom on the black hole horizon? Using the `membrane paradigm' we can reproduce coarse-grained physics outside the hole by assuming a fictitious membrane just outside the horizon. But to solve the information puzzle we need `real' degrees of freedom at the horizon, which can modify Hawking's evolution of quantum modes. We argue that recent results on gravitational microstates imply a set of real degrees of freedom just outside the horizon; the state of the hole is a linear combination of rapidly oscillating gravitational solutions with support concentrated just outsi…