학술논문

Microscopic origin of the entropy of astrophysical black holes
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Language
Abstract
We construct an infinite family of microstates for black holes in Minkowski spacetime which have effective semiclassical descriptions in terms of collapsing dust shells in the black hole interior. Quantum mechanical wormholes cause these states to have exponentially small, but universal, overlaps. We show that these overlaps imply that the microstates span a Hilbert space of log dimension equal to the event horizon area divided by four times the Newton constant, explaining the statistical origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.
Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. v3: minor edits, discussion section added