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Samir D. Mathur

Publications and source records attributed to Samir D. Mathur.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
arXiv2009

How fast can a black hole release its information?

When a shell collapses through its horizon, semiclassical physics suggests that information cannot escape from this horizon. One might hope that nonperturbative quantum gravity effects will change this situation and avoid the `information paradox'. We note that string theory has provided a set of states over which the wavefunction of the shell can spread, and that the number of these states is large enough that such a spreading would significantly modify the classically expected evolution. In this article we perform a simple estimate of the spreading time, showing that it is much shorter than the Hawking evaporation time for the hole. Thus information can emerge from the hole through the relaxation of the shell state into a linear combination of fuzzballs.

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arXiv2008

Fuzzballs and the information paradox: a summary and conjectures

The black hole information paradox is one of the most important issues in theoretical physics. We review some recent progress using string theory in understanding the nature of black hole microstates. For all cases where these microstates have been constructed, one finds that they are horizon sized `fuzzballs'. Most computations are for extremal states, but recently one has been able to study a special family of non-extremal microstates, and see `information carrying radiation' emerge from these gravity solutions. We discuss how the fuzzball picture can resolve the information paradox. We use the nature of fuzzball states to make some conjectures on the dynamical aspects of black holes, observing that the large phase space of fuzzball solutions can make the black hole more `quantum' than assumed in traditional treatments.

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arXiv2008

Non-extremal fuzzballs and ergoregion emission

In the traditional picture of black holes Hawking radiation is created by pair creation from the vacuum at the horizon. In the fuzzball proposal, individual microstates do not have a horizon with the `vacuum' state in its vicinity. For a special family of non-extremal microstates it was recently found that emission occurs due to pair creation in an ergoregion, rather than at a horizon. In this paper we extend this result to a slightly larger class of microstates, again finding exact agreement between the emission in the gravity picture and the CFT dual. We write down an expression for emission from geometries with ergoregions, in terms of the leading falloff behavior of the wavefunctions in the fuzzball region. Finally, we describe another family of nonextremal microstates and find their ergoregion.

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arXiv2008

Radiation from the non-extremal fuzzball

The fuzzball proposal says that the information of the black hole state is distributed throughout the interior of the horizon in a `quantum fuzz'. There are special microstates where in the dual CFT we have `many excitations in the same state'; these are described by regular classical geometries without horizons. Jejjala et.al constructed non-extremal regular geometries of this type. Cardoso et. al then found that these geometries had a classical instability. In this paper we show that the energy radiated through the unstable modes is exactly the Hawking radiation for these microstates. We do this by (i) starting with the semiclassical Hawking radiation rate (ii) using it to find the emission vertex in the CFT (iii) replacing the Boltzman distributions of the generic CFT state with the ones describing the microstate of interest (iv) observing that the emission now reproduces the classical instability. Because the CFT has `many excitations in the same state' we get the physics of a Bose-Einstein condensate rather than a thermal gas, and the usually slow Hawking emission increases, by Bose enhancement, to a classically radiated field. This system therefore provides a complete gravity description of information-carrying radiation from a special microstate of the nonextremal hole.

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arXiv2008

Pair creation in non-extremal fuzzball geometries

It is possible to construct a special family of nonextremal black hole microstates. These microstates are unstable, and emit radiation at a rate which is found to exactly equal the Hawking radiation rate predicted for them by the dual CFT. In this paper we analyze in more detail the nature of the radiation created by these unstable modes. The energy and angular momentum of the mode is found to be localized in two regions: one near infinity corresponding to the emitted quanta, and the other in the ergoregion which is deep inside the interior of the geometry. The energy and angular momenta are equal and opposite for these two contributions, as expected for emission from ergoregions. We conjecture that more general nonextremal microstates will possess ergoregions (with no axial symmetry), and radiation from these regions can be part of the general Hawking emission for the microstates.

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arXiv2008

Tunneling into fuzzball states

String theory suggests that black hole microstates are quantum, horizon sized `fuzzballs', rather than smooth geometries with horizon. Radiation from fuzzballs can carry information and does not lead to information loss. But if we let a shell of matter collapse then it creates a horizon, and it seems that subsequent radiation will lead to information loss. We argue that the resolution to this problem is that the shell can tunnel to the fuzzball configurations. The amplitude for tunneling is small because we are relating two macroscopically different configurations, but the number of states that we can tunnel to, given through the Bekenstein entropy, is very large. These small and large numbers can cancel each other, making it possible for the shell to tunnel into fuzzball states before a significant amount of radiation has been emitted. This offers a way to resolve the information paradox.

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arXiv2008

What is the state of the Early Universe?

As we follow our Universe to early times, we find that matter was crushed to high densities, somewhat similar to the behavior at a black hole singularity. String theory has made progress in explaining the internal structure of black holes, so we would like to extrapolate the ideas learnt from black holes to the early Universe. If we assume that we want the most probable state of the Universe at early times, then we should look at the kind of state that describes a generic black hole. This suggests a definite equation of state for the matter in the early Universe. Quantum effects can stretch across macroscopic distances in black holes, and these might be important in understanding the early Universe as well.

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arXiv2008

What Exactly is the Information Paradox?

The black hole information paradox tells us something important about the way quantum mechanics and gravity fit together. In these lectures I try to give a pedagogical review of the essential physics leading to the paradox, using mostly pictures. Hawking's argument is recast as a `theorem': if quantum gravity effects are confined to within a given length scale and the vacuum is assumed to be unique, then there will be information loss. We conclude with a brief summary of how quantum effects in string theory violate the first condition and make the interior of the hole a `fuzzball'.

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arXiv2007

Black hole size and phase space volumes

For extremal black holes the fuzzball conjecture says that the throat of the geometry ends in a quantum `fuzz', instead of being infinite in length with a horizon at the end. For the D1-D5 system we consider a family of sub-ensembles of states, and find that in each case the boundary area of the fuzzball satisfies a Bekenstein type relation with the entropy enclosed. We suggest a relation between the `capped throat' structure of microstate geometries and the fact that the extremal hole was found to have zero entropy in some gravity computations. We examine quantum corrections including string 1-loop effects and check that they do not affect our leading order computations.

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arXiv2007

Falling into a black hole

String theory tells us that quantum gravity has a dual description as a field theory (without gravity). We use the field theory dual to ask what happens to an object as it falls into the simplest black hole: the 2-charge extremal hole. In the field theory description the wavefunction of a particle is spread over a large number of `loops', and the particle has a well-defined position in space only if it has the same `position' on each loop. For the infalling particle we find one definition of `same position' on each loop, but there is a different definition for outgoing particles and no canonical definition in general in the horizon region. Thus the meaning of `position' becomes ill-defined inside the horizon.

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arXiv2006

Fractional Brane State in the Early Universe

In the early Universe matter was crushed to high densities, in a manner similar to that encountered in gravitational collapse to black holes. String theory suggests that the large entropy of black holes can be understood in terms of fractional branes and antibranes. We assume a similar physics for the matter in the early Universe, taking a toroidal compactification and letting branes wrap around the cycles of the torus. We find an equation of state p_i=w_i rho, for which the dynamics can be solved analytically. For black holes, fractionation can lead to non-local quantum gravity effects across length scales of order the horizon radius; similar effects in the early Universe might change our understanding of Cosmology in basic ways.

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arXiv2006

A Microscopic Model for the Black hole - Black string Phase Transition

Computations in general relativity have revealed an interesting phase diagram for the black hole - black string phase transition, with three different black objects present for a range of mass values. We can add charges to this system by `boosting' plus dualities; this makes only kinematic changes in the gravity computation but has the virtue of bringing the system into the near-extremal domain where a microscopic model can be conjectured. When the compactification radius is very large or very small then we get the microscopic models of 4+1 dimensional near-extremal holes and 3+1 dimensional near-extremal holes respectively (the latter is a uniform black string in 4+1 dimensions). We propose a simple model that interpolates between these limits and reproduces most of the features of the phase diagram. These results should help us understand how `fractionation' of branes works in general situations.

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arXiv2006

A microstate for the 3-charge black ring

We start with a 2-charge D1-D5 BPS geometry that has the shape of a ring; this geometry is regular everywhere. In the dual CFT there exists a perturbation that creates one unit of excitation for left movers, and thus adds one unit of momentum P. This implies that there exists a corresponding normalizable perturbation on the near-ring D1-D5 geometry. We find this perturbation, and observe that it is smooth everywhere. We thus find an example of `hair' for the black ring carrying three charges -- D1, D5 and one unit of P. The near-ring geometry of the D1-D5 supertube can be dualized to a D6 brane carrying fluxes corresponding to the `true' charges, while the quantum of P dualizes to a D0 brane. We observe that the fluxes on the D6 brane are at the threshold between bound and unbound states of D0-D6, and our wavefunction helps us learn something about binding at this threshold.

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arXiv2005

The quantum structure of black holes

We give an elementary review of black holes in string theory. We discuss black hole entropy from string microstates and Hawking radiation from these states. We then review the structure of 2-charge microstates, and explore how `fractionation' can lead to quantum effects over macroscopic length scales of order the horizon radius.

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arXiv2005

Dynamics of supertubes

We find the evolution of arbitrary excitations on 2-charge supertubes, by mapping the supertube to a string carrying traveling waves. We argue that when the coupling is increased from zero the energy of excitation leaks off to infinity, and when the coupling is increased still further a new set of long lived excitations emerge. We relate the excitations at small and large couplings to excitations in two different phases in the dual CFT. We conjecture a way to distinguish bound states from unbound states among 3-charge BPS geometries; this would identify black hole microstates among the complete set of BPS geometries.

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arXiv2005

Fuzzball geometries and higher derivative corrections for extremal holes

2-charge D1-D5 microstates are described by geometries which end in `caps' near r=0; these caps reflect infalling quanta back in finite time. We estimate the travel time for 3-charge geometries in 4-D, and find agreement with the dual CFT. This agreement supports a picture of `caps' for 3-charge geometries. We argue that higher derivative corrections to such geometries arise from string winding modes. We then observe that the `capped' geometries have no noncontractible circles, so these corrections remain bounded everywhere and cannot create a horizon or singularity.

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arXiv2005

Branes wrapping Black Holes

We examine the dynamics of extended branes, carrying lower dimensional brane charges, wrapping black holes and black hole microstates in M and Type II string theory. We show that they have a universal dispersion relation typical of threshold bound states with a total energy equal to the sum of the contributions from the charges. In near-horizon geometries of black holes, these are BPS states, and the dispersion relation follows from supersymmetry as well as properties of the conformal algebra. However they break all supersymmetries of the full asymptotic geometries of black holes and microstates. We comment on a recent proposal which uses these states to explain black hole entropy.

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