AdS Holography and Strings on the Horizon

The microscopic origin of black hole entropy remains one of the more intriguing open questions in theoretical physics. A subplot in this drama is the renowned Cardy-Verlinde formula, which uses two-dimensional conformal formalism to explain the entropy of an arbitrary-dimensional black hole. In this paper, by exploiting the AdS/CFT and black hole-string dualities, we are able to provide a physical picture for this paradoxical behavior. Following a recent study by Haylo (in a dS context), we show that the dual CFT for an asymptotically AdS spacetime actually conforms to a string-like description. Moreover, we demonstrate that this stringy CFT is directly related to a string that lives on the stretched horizon of an AdS-Schwarzschild-like black hole. In fact, after an appropriate renormalization, these two boundary theories are shown to be thermodynamically equivalent.