English

Fortuitous Chaos, BPS Black Holes, and Random Matrices

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-01-27 v1

Abstract

The ``fortuitous'' Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) sector states in gauge theory have been argued to furnish a description, through holography, of generic BPS black hole microstates. They are expected to be strongly chaotic, a necessary feature to capture the black hole dynamics. This dovetails nicely with the existence of various random matrix models of JT supergravity with extended supersymmetry, within which the BPS chaos must be contained as a subsector. This paper identifies and studies a simple random matrix model that underlies all known random matrix models of JT supergravity. It is argued that it captures many essential universal features of fortuitous BPS chaos. The model is topological, naturally interpolating between the Bessel and Airy models, where the gap energy E0E_0 controls the interpolation, and seems to have a simple intersection theory interpretation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.17122,
  title  = {Fortuitous Chaos, BPS Black Holes, and Random Matrices},
  author = {Clifford V. Johnson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.17122},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages (+3 with appendices, including bonus MATLAB file)