arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Juan M. Maldacena.
Using a simple hypothesis about the degrees of freedom of intersecting branes we find a microscopic counting argument that reproduces the entropy of a class of BPS black holes of type IIA string theory on general Calabi Yau three folds.
String theory is used to compute the microscopic entropy for several examples of black holes in compactifications with $N=2$ supersymmetry. Agreement with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and the moduli-independent $N=2$ area formula is found in all cases.
This thesis is devoted to trying to find a microscopic quantum description of black holes. We consider black holes in string theory which is a quantum theory of gravity. We find that the ``area law'' black hole entropy for extremal and near-extremal charged black holes arises from counting microscopic configurations. We study black holes in five and four spacetime dimensions. We calculate the Hawking temperature and give a physical picture of the Hawking decay process. Hopefully, the reader will find here a moderately self contained review of D-branes and string theory applied to black hole physics.
The Hawking Beckenstein entropy of near extremal fivebranes is calculated in terms of a gas of strings living on the fivebrane. These fivebranes can also be viewed as near extremal black holes in five dimensions.
The application of D-brane methods to large black holes whose Schwarzschild radius is larger than the compactification scale is problematic. Callan and Maldacena have suggested that despite apparent problems of strong interactions when the number of branes becomes large, the open string degrees of freedom may remain very dilute due to the growth of the horizon area which they claim grows more rapidly than the average number of open strings. Such a picture of a dilute weakly coupled string system conflicts with the picture of a dense string-soup that saturates the bound of one string per planck area. A more careful analysis shows that Callan and Maldacena were not fully consistent in their estimates. In the form that their model was studied it can not be used to extrapolate to large mass without being in conflict with the Hawking Bekenstein entropy formula. A somewhat modified model can reproduce the correct entropy formula. In this ``improved model" the number of string bits on the horizon scales like the entropy in agreement with earlier speculations of Susskind.
Strominger and Vafa have used D-brane technology to identify and precisely count the degenerate quantum states responsible for the entropy of certain extremal, BPS-saturated black holes. Here we give a Type-II D-brane description of a class of extremal {\it and} non-extremal five-dimensional Reissner-Nordström solutions and identify a corresponding set of degenerate D-brane configurations. We use this information to do a string theory calculation of the entropy, radiation rate and ``Hawking'' temperature. The results agree perfectly with standard Hawking results for the corresponding nearly extremal Reissner-Nordström black holes. Although these calculations suffer from open-string strong coupling problems, we give some reasons to believe that they are nonetheless qualitatively reliable. In this optimistic scenario there would be no ``information loss'' in black hole quantum evolution.
We show that polarization dependent string-string scattering provides new evidence for the identification of the Dabholkar-Harvey (DH) string solution with the heterotic string itself. First, we construct excited versions of the DH solution which carry arbitrary left-moving waves yet are annihilated by half the supersymmetries. These solutions correspond in a natural way to Bogomolny-bound-saturating excitations of the ground state of the heterotic string. When the excited string solutions are compactified to four dimensions, they reduce to Sen's family of extremal black hole solutions of the toroidally compactified heterotic string. We then study the large impact parameter scattering of two such string solutions. We develop methods which go beyond the metric on moduli space approximation and allow us to read off the subleading polarization dependent scattering amplitudes. We find perfect agreement with heterotic string tree amplitude predictions for the scattering of corresponding string states. Taken together, these results clearly identify the string states responsible for Sen's extremal black hole entropy. We end with a brief discussion of implications for the black hole information problem.
Several Quantum Impurity problems with four flavors of bulk fermions have zero temperature fixed points that show non fermi liquid behavior. They include the two channel Kondo effect, the two impurity Kondo model, and the fixed point occurring in the four flavor Callan-Rubakov effect. We provide a unified description which exploits the SO(8) symmetry of the bulk fermions. This leads to a mapping between correlation functions of the different models. Furthermore, we show that the two impurity Kondo fixed point and the Callan-Rubakov fixed point are the same theory. All these models have the puzzling property that the S matrix for scattering of fermions off the impurity seems to be non unitary. We resolve this paradox showing that the fermions scatter into collective excitations which fit into the spinor representation of SO(8). Enlarging the Hilbert space to include those we find simple linear boundary conditions. Using these boundary conditions it is straightforward to recover all partition functions, boundary states and correlation functions of these models.