Counting the Microstates of a Kerr Black Hole

Abstract

We show that an extremal Kerr black hole, appropriately lifted to M-theory, can be transformed to a Kaluza-Klein black hole in M-theory, or a D0-D6 charged black hole in string theory. Since all the microstates of the latter have recently been identified, one can exactly reproduce the entropy of an extremal Kerr black hole. We also show that the topology of the event horizon is not well defined in M-theory.