Blackish Holes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the normal modes of a scalar probe in a BTZ black hole background with a Dirichlet wall, revealing how these modes condense to produce thermal correlators and insights into quantum chaos and emergent thermal physics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of scalar normal modes in a BTZ background with a Dirichlet wall, linking mode condensation to thermalization and quantum chaos phenomena.

Findings

Normal modes condense into a branch cut near the horizon

Emergence of quasi-normal modes and thermal correlators

Angular momentum enhances mode condensation and thermalization

Abstract

Based on previous works, in this article we systematically analyze the implications of the explicit normal modes of a probe scalar sector in a BTZ background with a Dirichlet wall, in an asymptotically AdS-background. This is a Fuzzball-inspired geometric model, at least in an effective sense. We demonstrate explicitly that in the limit when the Dirichlet wall approaches the event horizon, the normal modes condense fast to yield an effective branch cut along the real line in the complex frequency plane. In turn, in this approximation, quasi-normal modes associated to the BTZ black hole emerge and the corresponding two-point function is described by a thermal correlator, associated with the Hawking temperature in the general case and with the right-moving temperature in the extremal limit. We further show, analytically, that the presence of a non-vanishing angular momentum non-perturbatively enhances this condensation. The consequences are manifold: {\it e.g.}~there is an emergent {\it strong thermalization} due to these modes, adding further support to a quantum chaotic nature associated to the spectral form factor. We explicitly demonstrate, by considering a classical collapsing geometry, that the one-loop scalar determinant naturally inherits a Dirichlet boundary condition, as the shell approaches the scale of the event horizon. This provides a plausible dynamical mechanism in the dual CFT through a global quench, that can create an emergent Dirichlet boundary close to the horizon-scale. We offer comments on how this simple model can describe salient features of Fuzzball-geometries, as well as of extremely compact objects. This also provides an explicit realization of how an effective thermal physics emerges from a non-thermal microscopic description, within a semi-classical account of gravity, augmented with an appropriate boundary condition.