Holography and quantum black holes

Bekenstein and Hawking discovered that black holes behave as thermodynamic systems with a temperature and an entropy. While string theory was successful in explaining the microscopic origin of the entropy of certain extremal black holes, it did so in a rather abstract way, and a more concrete description of the black hole microstates remains an open problem to this day. The geometry of the extremal black holes in question resembles, near the horizon, a two-dimensional anti-de-Sitter (AdS2) spacetime, and the problem is related to our poor understanding of quantum gravity in AdS2. The system has a conjectured `holographic' description as a quantum mechanical system with conformal symmetry, which is derived from string theory. This project aims to explore and test this description, with the possibility to branch out into other aspects of holography and black holes.

References:

[1] J.M. Maldacena, A.Strominger and E.Witten, Black hole entropy in M theory, JHEP 12 (1997), 002, https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9711053
[2] A.Sen, Quantum Entropy Function from AdS(2)/CFT(1) Correspondence, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 24 (2009), 4225–4244, https://arxiv.org/abs/0809.3304
[3] F.Denef, Quantum quivers and Hall/hole halos, JHEP 10(2002), 023, https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206072
[4] D.Mirfendereski, J.Raeymaekers and D.Van Den Bleeken, Superconformal mechanics of AdS2 D-brane boundstates, JHEP 12 (2020), 176, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07107