Worldsheet Correlators in Black Hole Microstates

Abstract

Light probes interacting with heavy bound states such as black holes give rise to observables containing valuable dynamical information. Recently, a family of black hole microstates was shown to admit an exact string worldsheet description. We construct the physical vertex operators of these models, and compute an extensive set of novel heavy-light correlators. We then obtain the first match between worldsheet correlators in black hole microstates and the holographically dual conformal field theory. We conjecture a closed formula for correlators with an arbitrary number of light insertions. As an application, we compute the analogue of the Hawking radiation rate for these microstates.