Throat quantization of the Schwarzschild–Tangherlini(-AdS) black hole

Abstract

Adopting the throat quantization pioneered by Louko and Mäkelä, we derive the mass and area spectra for the Schwarzschild–Tangherlini black hole and its anti-de Sitter (AdS) generalization in arbitrary dimensions. We find that the system can be quantized exactly in three special cases: the three-dimensional BTZ black hole, toroidal black holes in any dimension, and five-dimensional Schwarzshild–Tangherlini(-AdS) black holes. For the remaining cases the spectra are obtained for large mass using the WKB approximation. For asymptotically flat black holes, the area/entropy has an equally spaced spectrum, as expected from previous work. In the asymptotically AdS case on the other hand, it is the mass spectrum that is equally spaced. Our exact results for the BTZ black hole mass with Dirichlet boundary conditions are consistent with the spectra of the corresponding operators in the dual CFT.