Abstract

We study the microstates of the “small ” black hole in the 1 2-BPS sector of AdS5 × S 5, the superstar [1], using the powerful holographic description provided by LLM [2]. The system demonstrates the inherently statistical nature of black holes, with the geometry of [1] emerging only after averaging over an ensemble of geometries. The individual microstate geometries differ in the highly non-trivial topology of a quantum foam at their core, and the entropy can be understood as a partition of N units of flux among 5-cycles, as required by flux quantization. While the system offers confirmation of the most controversial aspect of Mathur and Lunin’s By defining a full quantum-mechanical description of gravity in terms of a dual gauge theory, holography is expected to provide resolution to many outstanding questions in general relativity. However, since it is often very difficult to construct both sides of the duality, many questions have been slow in revealing their mysteries. A beautiful recent work by Lin, Lunin and Maldacena [2] has