Worldsheet Correlators in Black Hole Microstates

Abstract

Light probes interacting with heavy bound states such as black holes give rise to interesting observables containing valuable dynamical information. Recently, a family of black hole microstates was shown to admit an exact string worldsheet description. We construct the physical vertex operators of these models, and derive their form in the low-energy AdS$_3$ limit. We then compute an extensive set of novel heavy-light correlators in these backgrounds. A subset of these provide the first match between worldsheet correlators in black hole microstates and the holographically dual conformal field theory, in a highly non-trivial way. We further conjecture a closed formula for heavy-light correlators with an arbitrary number of light insertions. As an application, we compute the analogue of the Hawking radiation rate for these microstates.