(11.07.) Black hole microstates
Roberto Emparan (Barcelona)
11.07.2024 at 16:15
Identifying a set of microstates for a black hole in a regime of strong gravitational coupling is necessary to understand the nature of the black hole interior, the singularity, the experience of the infalling observers, and other problems. Black holes can harbor arbitrarily large interiors in the form of bag-of-gold geometries, which have the desirable property of providing good microstates, but the bad feature of yielding too many of them, even an infinite number. I will describe how the gravitational path integral allows the construction of an extremely universal class of microstates (neutral or charged, with rotation, extremal or not, and in any number of dimensions), and argue that spacetime wormholes reduce the dimension of the space of these states to a value in agreement with the Bekenstein-Hawking formula.