The 2D black hole paper recognized in GRF essay competition

On Mar. 29, 2021, a short paper titled “Truly two-dimensional black holes under dimensional transitions of spacetime” was submitted for Gravity Research Foundation 2021 essay competition. It has just earned Honorable Mention in this prestigious essay competition on topic of gravity.

This short paper was tailored out of the previous long paper titled “From neutron and quark stars to black holes” (see the earlier news). It takes the simplest type of black holes, i.e., a spherically symmetric static Schwarzschild black hole into consideration and profoundly reveal its nature as a 2D boundary of our 4D spacetime.

This simple yet coherent picture gives us an intriguing dual description of black holes as both classical and quantum bodies. In particular, a Schwarzschild black hole can be described well as a perfect fluid of free massless Majorana fermions and gauge bosons under a 2D supersymmetric mirror model with new understanding of emergent classical gravity from dimensional evolution of spacetime. As a result, black holes are nothing but boundaries of 4D spacetime. Amazingly, the dual description provides a consistent understanding of the black hole’s microphysics and structures including its temperature, density, and entropy in both quantum and classical ways.