Black hole entropy function, attractors and precision counting of microstates (Q957729)

A black hole is called extremal, if the two zeroes of the essential metric component coincide: For the Reissner-Nordström black hole, one has \(g_{00} = (1-a/r)\cdot (1-b/r) \) with certain positive constants \(a\) and \(b\) encoding charge and mass of the black hole. For \(a=b\), the hole is called extremal. For this case, several calculations are easier to perform, e.g. the entropy of the black hole. From the paper's introduction: ``These lecture notes describe recent progress in our understanding of the attractor mechanism and entropy of extremal black holes based on the entropy function formalism. They also describe the precise computation of the microscopic degeneracy of a class of quarter BPS dyons in \({\mathcal{N}=4}\) supersymmetric string theories, and compare the statistical entropy of these dyons, expanded in inverse powers of electric and magnetic charges, with a similar expansion of the corresponding black hole entropy. This comparison is extended to include the contribution to the entropy from multi-centred black holes as well.'' The paper has 8 appendices and a reference list of 264 items.