Abstract
This brief conference proceeding attempts to explain the implications of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence for black hole entropy in a language accessible to relativists and other non-string theorists. The main conclusion is that the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy S BH is the density of states associated with certain superselections sectors, defined by what may be called the algebra of boundary observables. Interestingly while there is a valid context in which this result can be restated as “S BH counts all states inside the black hole,” there may also be another in which it may be restated as “S BH does not count all states inside the black hole, but only those that are distinguishable from the outside.” The arguments and conclusions represent the author’s translation of the community’s collective wisdom, combined with a few recent results.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY05-55669, and by funds from the University of California.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Marolf, D. Black holes, AdS, and CFTs. Gen Relativ Gravit 41, 903–917 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-008-0749-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-008-0749-7