Schedule Oct 22, 2013
Non-Extremality from Metastability?
Andrea Puhm, UCSB

While over the past years considerable progress has been made in the microscopic understanding of extremal black holes, the fundamental description of non-extremal black holes such as the Schwarzschild solution remains an open question. A first step towards addressing this problem, is to understand the physics of near-extremal microstates which, as I will show, can be constructed from metastable supertubes in extremal microstate geometries of opposite charge. To establish the existence of these configurations far away from extremality and to see whether the same mechanism can be used to construct Schwarzschild microstates, it is necessary to understand the backreaction of the metastable supertubes which turns out to be a challenging problem. Moreover, the backreaction of anti-branes on a variety of supergravity backgrounds has revealed the appearance of puzzling flux singularities. In light of the difficulties in understanding the fate of these metastable configurations at strong coupling, one may ask whether there is another avenue to pursue. I will discuss how metastability can be studied at weak coupling by the quiver quantum mechanics approach and present a surprising preliminary result.

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