String Theory seminar - Francesco Benini Seminar

 

One of the great successes of string theory, as a theory of quantum gravity, is the explanation of the entropy of asymptotically-flat black holes. I will present, instead, a counting of the microstates of certain black holes in AdS4. The black holes have an holographic description as RG flows from a 3D CFT to superconformal quantum mechanics, and the counting of microstates proceeds via supersymmetric localization. Along the way, we will define and compute an index for topologically twisted theories, and propose an extremization principle to determine the superconformal R-symmetry in quantum mechanics.