Black Hole Monodromy and Conformal Field Theory

Abstract

The analytic structure of solutions to the Klein-Gordon equation in a black hole background, as represented by monodromy data, is intimately related to black hole thermodynamics. It encodes the "hidden conformal symmetry" of a non-extremal black hole, and it explains why features of the inner event horizon appear in scattering data such as greybody factors. This indicates that hidden conformal symmetry is generic within a universality class of black holes.