Relating Schwarzschild Black Holes to Branes-Antibranes

In the context of string theory, it is possible to explain the microscopic origin of the entropy of certain black holes in terms of D-brane systems. To date, most of the cases studied in detail refer to extremal (supersymmetric) or near-extremal black holes. In this work we propose a microscopic model for certain black branes (extended versions of black holes) which would apply to cases arbitrarily far from extremality, including the Schwarzschild case. The model is based on ...

We consider slightly non-extremal black 3-branes of type IIB supergravity and show that their Bekenstein-Hawking entropy agrees, up to a mysterious factor, with an entropy derived by counting non-BPS excitations of the Dirichlet 3-brane. These excitations are described in terms of the statistical mechanics of a 3+1 dimensional gas of massless open string states. This is essentially the classic problem of blackbody radiation. The blackbody temperature is related to the tempera...

Intersecting M-branes are known to describe multi charged black holes. Using a configuration of such intersecting branes and antibranes, together with massless excitations living on them, we give a description of Schwarzschild black holes following Danielsson, Guijosa, and Kruczenski. We calculate the entropy of these black holes and find that it agrees, upto a numerical factor, with the entropy of the corresponding Schwarzschild black holes in supergravity approximation. We ...

Recently a number of authors have used a system of branes and antibranes at finite temperature for microscopic modeling of non-extremal black holes in string theory. The entropy of the system is derived from the simplified assumption of decoupled gas of open strings on the stacks of branes and antibranes and extremizing the total entropy with respect to the number of branes (or antibranes). The resulting entropy differs from the supergravity entropy by a deficit factor. We gi...

We construct a regular and neutral bound state of two Strominger-Vafa black holes in type IIB supergravity, one BPS and the other anti-BPS. On the one hand, we show that the bound-state entropy admits a microscopic description in terms of branes and anti-branes within the black holes. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the entropy approaches half of the Schwarzschild entropy as the mass becomes significantly larger than the Kaluza-Klein scales. This opens up the possibili...

We review a recent proposal towards a microscopic understanding of the entropy of non-supersymmetric spacetimes -- with emphasis on the Schwarzschild black hole. The approach is based at an intermediate step on the description of the non-supersymmetric spacetime in terms of dual Euclidean brane pairs of type-II string-theory or M-theory. By counting specific chain structures on the brane-complex, it is shown that one can reproduce the exact Schwarzschild black hole entropy pl...

We describe multicharged black holes in terms of branes and antibranes together with multiple copies of gas of massless excitations. Assuming that energies of these copies of gas are all equal, we find that the entropy of the brane antibrane configuration agrees with that of the multicharged black hole in supergravity approximation, upto a factor X. We find that X = 1 for a suitable normalisation which admits a simple empirical interpretation that the available gas energy is ...

This is an expanded version of a talk given at ``{\em IInd Recontre du Vietnam}'' held at Ho Chi Minh City in October, 1995. We discuss several aspects of black hole entropy in string theory. We first explain why the geometric entropy in two dimensional noncritical string theory is nonperturbatively finite. We then explain the philosophy of regarding massive string states as black branes and how the Beckenstein-Hawking entropy for extremal BPS black holes may be understood as...

We review the recent developments in superstrings. We start with a brief summary of various consistent superstring theories and discuss T-duality which necessarily leads to the presence of D-branes. The properties of D-branes are summarized and we discuss how these suggest the existence of 11-dimensional quantum theory, M-theory, which is believed to give rise to various superstrings as perturbative expansions around particular backgrounds in the theory. We also discuss the i...

The supersymmetric p-branes of Type II string theory can be interpreted after compactification as extremal black holes with zero entropy and infinite temperature. We show how the p-branes avoid this apparent, catastrophic instability by developing an infinite mass gap. Equivalently, these black holes behave like elementary particles: they are dressed by effective potentials that prevent absorption of impinging particles. In contrast, configurations with 2, 3, and 4 intersecti...