Paper detail

Black Hole Horizons and Bose-Einstein Condensation

Consider a particle sitting at a fixed position outside of a stable black hole. If the system is heated up, the black hole horizon grows and there should exist a critical temperature above which the particle enters the black hole interior. We solve a simple model describing exactly this situation: a large N matrix quantum mechanics modeling a fixed D-particle in a black hole background. We show that indeed a striking phenomenon occurs: above some critical temperature, there is a non-perturbative Bose-Einstein condensation of massless strings. The transition, even though precisely defined by the presence of the condensate, cannot be sharply detected by measurements made in a finite amount of time. The order parameter is fundamentally non-local in time and corresponds to infinite-time correlations.