Fortuitous states for 4d black holes

Abstract

The AdS/CFT correspondence makes it possible in principle to study explicit black hole microstates using field theory techniques. In practice, this is still difficult because the field theory is only dual to gravity when it is strongly coupled. A more modest goal is to focus on supersymmetric black holes which have the minimal energy allowed by their other charges. The superconformal index suggests that many of these are protected from quantum corrections and can therefore be constructed at weak coupling. I will explain how one can identify candidates for black holes by searching the Hilbert space of ABJM theory. On general grounds, these should depend sensitively on trace relations at finite N. This principle, known as fortuity, was first established in a similar study of maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. I will show that similarities between the two theories extend to the quantitative level thereby allowing additional progress to be made without a brute force search.