Black Hole Bose Condensation

Abstract

General consensus on the nature of the degrees of freedom responsible for the black hole entropy remains elusive despite decades of effort dedicated to the problem. Different approaches to quantum gravity disagree in their description of the microstates and, more significantly, in the statistics used to count them. In some approaches (string theory, AdS/CFT) the elementary degrees of freedom are indistinguishable, whereas they must be treated as distinguishable in other approaches to quantum gravity (eg., LQG) in order to recover the Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy law. However, different statistics will imply different behaviors of the black hole outside the thermodynamic limit. We illustrate this point by quantizing the Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole, for which we argue that Bose condensation will occur leading to a "cold", stable remnant.