The Black Hole S-Matrix from Quantum Mechanics
Abstract
We revisit the old black hole S-Matrix construction and its new partial wave expansion of 't Hooft. Inspired by old ideas from non-critical string theory & Matrix Quantum Mechanics, we reformulate the scattering in terms of a quantum mechanical model\textemdash of waves scattering off inverted harmonic oscillator potentials\textemdash that exactly reproduces the unitary black hole S-Matrix for all spherical harmonics; each partial wave corresponds to an inverted harmonic oscillator with ground state energy that is shifted relative to the s-wave oscillator. Identifying a connection to 2d string theory allows us to show that there is an exponential degeneracy in how a given total initial energy may be distributed among many partial waves of the 4d black hole.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.07885,
title = {The Black Hole S-Matrix from Quantum Mechanics},
author = {Panagiotis Betzios and Nava Gaddam and Olga Papadoulaki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.07885},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
31 pages. Published in JHEP, replaced fig.2 to clarify the discussion