The Cheshire Cap

Abstract

A key role in black hole dynamics is played by the inner horizon; most of the entropy of a slightly nonextremal charged or rotating black hole is carried there, and the covariant entropy bound suggests that the rest lies in the region between the inner and outer horizon. An attempt to match this onto results of the microstate geometries program suggests that a `Higgs branch' of underlying long string states of the configuration space realizes the degrees of freedom on the inner horizon, while the `Coulomb branch' describes the inter-horizon region and beyond. Support for this proposal comes from an analysis of the way singularities develop in microstate geometries, and their close analogy to corresponding structures in fivebrane dynamics. These singularities signal the opening up of the long string degrees of freedom of the theory, which are partly visible from the geometry side. A conjectural picture of the black hole interior is proposed, wherein the long string degrees of freedom resolve the geometrical singularity on the inner horizon, yet are sufficiently nonlocal to communicate information to the outer horizon and beyond.

64 pages, 8 figures. Version 2: References added, together with substantial elaborations and clarifications

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• The fuzzball proposal for black holes
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• Universal Area Product Formulae for Rotating and Charged Black Holes in Four and Higher Dimensions
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Cited by in corpus (24)

• Asymptotically-flat supergravity solutions deep inside the black-hole regime
• Tensionless Strings from Worldsheet Symmetries
• Holographic description of non-supersymmetric orbifolded D1-D5-P solutions
• String Theory of Supertubes
• Little Strings, Long Strings, and Fuzzballs
• Early Scrambling and Capped BTZ Geometries
• Non-BPS multi-bubble microstate geometries
• Near horizon dynamics of three dimensional black holes
• Information loss, made worse by quantum gravity?
• Perturbative String Thermodynamics near Black Hole Horizons
• Hair-brane Ideas on the Horizon
• The long string at the stretched horizon and the entropy of large non-extremal black holes
• Highly Excited Strings I: Generating Function
• Revisiting noninteracting string partition functions in Rindler space
• A model with no firewall
• Hot Attractors
• String Theory in Polar Coordinates and the Vanishing of the One-Loop Rindler Entropy
• Three-Charge Black Holes and Quarter BPS States in Little String Theory
• Microstate solutions from black hole deconstruction
• Hair on non-extremal D1-D5 bound states
• Generalized Hot Attractors
• Chiral boundary conditions for singletons and W-branes
• The Hot Attractor Mechanism: Decoupling Without Deep Throats
• Black Holes in String Theory