Holography and the Quantum Nature of Black Holes

Some of the most outstanding problems in modern theoretical high energy physics are related to the puzzles arising in the physics of black holes. More than 40 years ago Bekenstein and Hawking discovered that black holes have an entropy proportional to the area of their horizon. A major theoretical challenge is to account for the microstates responsible for this entropy. String theory is a leading theory of quantum gravity that has been used to address this hard problem, however a complete solution is still missing. An important piece of the puzzle is the realization that there is a relation, called the AdS/CFT correspondence, between gravitational physics and quantum field theory. This correspondence offers new insights on the statistical description of black holes which I plan to explore in my research. Firstly, I will work towards a better understanding of asymptotically AdS black holes in five and seven dimensions, arising from the M5-branes of M-theory. I will construct several new black hole solutions of this type and provide their uplift to 11 dimensions. The entropy of these black hole solutions will then be computed in the holographically dual quantum field theory by employing recent results from supersymmetric localization. Finally, I will study how quantum corrections to supergravity arising from string theory affect the entropy of these black hole solutions and compare the results with the dual quantum field theory.