Vishnu Jejjala (Mandelstam Institute for Theoretical Physics) “Hot Attractors”

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Abstract: Non-extremal black holes, which emit thermal Hawking radiation, have two horizons: the event horizon or outer horizon and the Cauchy horizon or inner horizon. Surprisingly, for a broad class of solutions to the Einstein equations, the product of the areas of the inner and outer horizons is the square of the area of the horizon of the zero temperature black hole obtained from taking the smooth extremal limit. We use the attractor mechanism in supergravity to motivate this statement. Non-extremal geometries at the Reissner-Nordström point, where the scalar moduli are held fixed, can be lifted to solutions in supergravity with a near-horizon AdS3×S2. These solutions have the same entropy and temperature as the original black hole and therefore allow an interpretation of the underlying gravitational degrees of freedom in terms of CFT2. Symmetries of the moduli space enable us to explicate the origin of entropy in the extremal limit. We consider various generalizations of these results.