The Kerr/CFT Correspondence

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:09010038,
            doi = {10.48660/09010038},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/09010038},
            author = {},
            keywords = {Quantum Gravity, Quantum Fields and Strings},
            language = {en},
            title = {The Kerr/CFT Correspondence},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2009},
            month = {jan},
            note = {PIRSA:09010038 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
          

Abstract

Holography is usually applied to black holes that are supersymmetric, charged, or living in higher dimensions. The astrophysical Kerr black holes that have been observed in the sky have none of these nice properties, and AdS/CFT does not apply. Nevertheless, by studying the symmetries of the near horizon region, I will show that extreme Kerr black holes are holographically dual to a two-dimensional conformal field theory. The U(1) isometry of the near horizon region extends asymptotically to a Virasoro algebra. We compute the central charge semiclassically, and find in particular that the observed black hole GRS 1915+105 is approximately dual to a CFT with central charge 10^79. The microstate counting of the dual CFT correctly reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. I will also discuss generalizations to a wide variety of extreme black holes in assorted theories, the possibility of moving away from the external limit, and potential applications of the correspondence.