Randomizing excitations of half-BPS states gives near-extremal black holes

by Evita Verheijden (Nordita)

Wednesday 29 Oct 2025, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Stockholm

92110 (Ångströmlaboratoriet)

I will discuss a concrete realization in N=4 SYM of the mechanism of cryptographic censorship: that sufficiently random time evolution in a holographic CFT incurs an event horizon in the bulk dual. I will show that perturbing half-BPS states by randomly distributing a large number of defects over them corresponds in the gravitational dual to exciting an extremal (horizonless) black hole to near-extremality. This random distribution of defects corresponds to acting with a typical random isometry on the half-BPS subspace. This allows us to interpret this process in the field theory as an extension of cryptographic censorship.