How to build a black hole out of instantons

Abstract

An often fruitful route to study quantum gravity is the determination and study of quantum mechanical models — that is, models with finite degrees of freedom — that capture the dynamics of a black hole’s microstates. An example of such a model is the superconformal quantum mechanics of Yang-Mills instantons, which has a proposed gravitational dual description as M-theory on a background of the form X7 × S4. This model arises in the strongly-coupled limit of the BFSS matrix model with additional fundamental hypermultiplets, offering a route towards useful numerical simulation. We construct a six-parameter black hole solution in this theory, which is generically non-supersymmetric and non-extremal, and is shown to arise in an “ultra-spinning” limit of the recently-found six-parameter AdS7 solution. We compute its thermodynamic properties, and show that in the supersymmetric limit the entropy and on-shell action match precisely the expected results as computed from the superconformal index of the quantum mechanics, to leading order in the supergravity regime. The low-lying spectrum thus provides access to the dynamics of near-extremal black holes, whose spectra are expected to receive strong quantum corrections.