Black Holes and Random Variables

Abstract

We formulate an avatar of the Fyodorov-Hiary-Keating conjecture for black hole microstate counts in quantum gravity. By holography, this implies sharp bounds on interval counts of high-dimension primary operators in conformal field theory. The extremal fluctuations of these counts are characterized by a random variable, with a prescribed tail distribution. At large $N$, these order-one erratic fluctuations set a quantitative limit on the resolution of the semiclassical AdS gravitational path integral. Gaussian random models for state counts arise naturally in this context; we express the phenomenon of erratic $N$-dependence in AdS/CFT as a decorrelation property of these models. Our broader point is to suggest that AdS black hole microstate spectra and their field theory duals should exhibit the extreme value statistics of random matrices, lying in the universality class of Gaussian log-correlated fields.