Black hole microstate counting from the gravitational path integral

Abstract

A bstract Reproducing the integer count of black hole microstates from the gravitational path integral is an important problem in quantum gravity. In this paper, we show that, by using supersymmetric localization, the gravitational path integral for $$ \frac{1}{8} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mfrac> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mn>8</mml:mn> </mml:mfrac> </mml:math> -BPS black holes in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 8 supergravity reproduces the index obtained in the string theory construction of such black holes, including all non-perturbatively suppressed geometries. A more refined argument then shows that, not only the black hole index, but also the total number of black hole microstates within an energy window above extremality that is polynomially suppressed in the charges, also matches this string theory index. To achieve such a match, we compute the one-loop determinant arising in the localization calculation for all $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 2 supergravity supermultiplets in the $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 8 gravity supermultiplet. Furthermore, we carefully account for the contribution of boundary zero-modes, which can be seen as arising from the zero-temperature limit of the $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 4 super-Schwarzian, and show that performing the exact path integral over such modes provides a critical contribution needed for the match to be achieved. A discussion about the importance of such zero-modes in the wider context of all extremal black holes is presented in a companion paper.

Topics & Concepts