Universal construction of black hole microstates
Ana Climent, Roberto Emparan, Javier M. Magán, Martin Sasieta, Alejandro Vilar López
Abstract
We refine and extend a recent construction of sets of black hole microstates with semiclassical interiors that span a Hilbert space of dimension <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:msup><a:mi>e</a:mi><a:mi>S</a:mi></a:msup></a:math>, where <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mi>S</c:mi></c:math> is the black hole entropy. We elaborate on the definition and properties of microstates in statistical and black hole mechanics. The gravitational description of microstates employs matter shells in the interior of the black hole, and we argue that in the limit where the shells are very heavy, the construction acquires universal validity. To this end, we show it for very wide classes of black holes; we first extend the construction to rotating and charged black holes, including extremal and near-extremal solutions, with or without supersymmetry, and we sketch how the construction of microstates can be embedded in string theory. We then describe how the approach can include general quantum corrections, near or far from extremality. For supersymmetric black holes, the microstates we construct differ from other recent constructions in that the interior excitations are not confined within the near-extremal throat. Published by the American Physical Society 2024