Has String Theory Finally Unraveled the Mysteries of Black Holes?

[Gavin]

I was working on black holes in Matrix theory about five years ago, but stopped to pursue other interests. I'm getting back into physics now and I'm trying to find out what I've missed. First I'd like to find out what happened to my favorite topic, black holes in string theory.

To this end, I was reading a nice interview with Lenny Susskind at "Edge":

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/susskind03/susskind_index.html

In it, Lenny says that the black hole problem is solved. He is pretty emphatic about this:

"There was an eruption of papers—mine, Joe Polchinski's, Andy Strominger's, Cumrun Vafa's—that really nailed that problem down. And black holes have been solved. Black holes have been understood. To this day the only real physics problem that has been solved by string theory is the problem of black holes. It led to some extremely revolutionary and strange ideas."

I've worked with Lenny in the past and know that he should be taken very seriously, but not always literally. Are them some review papers I can read that will catch me up on this solution, or is this mostly the same ideas that were around five years ago. Then we had a pretty good idea about what was going on, but we couldn't calculate the entropy of any realistic, astrophysical back hole. We could only find the entropy in special casses or at strage limit in higer dimensions.

I'll continue to look on my own, but combing through five years of hep-th arxiv is a pretty big task. I'd love to get some reading suggestions.

Gavin

 

[kneemo]

black holes, pp-waves, dS/CFT

I was working on black holes in Matrix theory about five years ago, but stopped to pursue other interests. I'm getting back into physics now and I'm trying to find out what I've missed. First I'd like to find out what happened to my favorite topic, black holes in string theory.

Hi Gavin

You may enjoy the following:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0202021

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0212345

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0310273

-Mike

 

[kneemo]

Black Holes, Lubos style

:surprise:
Oops, forgot to recommend Lubos' paper:

Asymptotic black hole quasinormal frequencies
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0301173

He's on here to discuss questions, which is extremely convenient.

 

[Gavin]

Thanks for the nice references. Hawking's talk has also helped me a lot -- not directly, but through the discussion it has generated.

Based on what I've been reading, it appears that the situation is not fundamentally different from five years ago, when people were coming to terms with the AdS/CFT correspondence. Some interesting stuff has been done, but there isn't any general calculation that gives the entropy yet.

Thanks,
Gavin