Moulting Black Holes

Abstract

Abstract We find a family of novel supersymmetric phases of the D1-D5 CFT, which in certain ranges of charges have more entropy than all known ensembles. We also find bulk BPS configurations that exist in the same range of parameters as these phases, and have more entropy than a BMPV black hole; they can be thought of as coming from a BMPV black hole shedding a “hair” condensate outside of the horizon. The entropy of the bulk configurations is smaller than that of the CFT phases, which indicates that some of the CFT states are lifted at strong coupling. Neither the bulk nor the boundary phases are captured by the elliptic genus, which makes the coincidence of the phase boundaries particularly remarkable. Our configurations are supersymmetric, have non-Cardy-like entropy, and are the first instance of a black hole entropy enigma with a controlled CFT dual. Furthermore, contrary to common lore, these objects exist in a region of parameter space (between the “cosmic censorship bound” and the “unitarity bound”) where no black holes were thought to exist.