The spectrum of near-BPS Kerr-Newman black holes and the ABJM mass gap

Abstract

Supersymmetric rotating 1/16-BPS black holes in $AdS_4 \times S^7$ are expected to capture the average degeneracy of BPS states in the dual ABJM superconformal theory for given fixed charges. This has been successfully demonstrated for the superconformal index using complexified black hole metrics, but a naive Gibbons-Hawking calculation of the actual degeneracies in the low temperature limit is invalid due to large quantum fluctuations of the near horizon $AdS_2$ metric. We argue that in a particular mixed grand/canonical ensemble, these fluctuations of the near-BPS Kerr-Newman black holes are described by a version of the $\mathcal{N}=2$ super-Schwarzian theory with $SU(1,1|1)$ symmetry. Using this description as well as properties of ABJM, we recover the large $N$ superconformal index and find a characteristic ``mass gap'' of order $N^{-3/2}$ between the 1/16-BPS states and the lightest near BPS state. We further make a prediction for the operator dimension spectrum above the gap in the large $N$, low $T$ limit. Our results are consistent with the Bekenstein-Hawking formula at large energies, random matrix theory at low energies, and the microscopic index.