Soft Heisenberg Hair

by Daniel Grumiller (Vienna University of Technology)

Monday 3 Apr 2017, 13:15 → 14:14 Europe/Stockholm

132:028 (Nordita East Building)

"Soft hair" refers to zero energy excitations in the near horizon region of black holes or cosmologies, advocated by Hawking, Perry and Strominger. I review recent results on soft hair in 3 spacetime dimensions. The near horizon symmetry algebra is surprisingly simple, namely infinite copies of the Heisenberg algebra. The results are fairly universal and allow a semi-classical construction of microstates for BTZ black holes, whose degeneracy correctly accounts for their Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.