Black Hole Microstate Solutions, Fuzzballs and Firewalls - Iosif Bena

Friday 29 Nov 2013, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Paris

I will review the construction of "black hole microstate geometries" - smooth solutions that have the same charges and asymptotics as black holes, but do not have a horizon. I will then discuss some of the properties of these solutions that indicate that they describe typical black hole microstates.This indicates that the classical black hole solution is a thermodynamic approximation of an ensemble of horizonless configurations, and that this solution stops giving a valid description of the physics at the scale of the horizon. This gives a supergravity and string theory realization of the recent fuzzball/firewall arguments which indicate that the only way to solve Hawking's Information Paradox is to have structure at the horizon scale. I will finish by discussing the implications of this for cosmology and other quantum theories of gravity.