A New Approach to Black Hole Microstates

Abstract

If one encodes the gravitational degrees of freedom in an orthonormal frame field there is a very natural first order action one can write down (which in four dimensions is known as the Goldberg action). In this essay we will show that this action contains a boundary action for certain microscopic degrees of freedom living at the horizon of a black hole, and argue that these degrees of freedom hold great promise for explaining the microstates responsible for black hole entropy, in any number of spacetime dimensions. This approach faces many interesting challenges, both technical and conceptual.