{"work":{"id":"06d08ede-739e-44a8-bbc0-7aa9ef9b0131","openalex_id":null,"doi":null,"arxiv_id":"2011.01953","raw_key":null,"title":"The statistical mechanics of near-BPS black holes","authors":null,"authors_text":"M","year":2020,"venue":"hep-th","abstract":"Due to the failure of thermodynamics for low temperature near-extremal black holes, it has long been conjectured that a \"thermodynamic mass gap\" exists between an extremal black hole and the lightest near-extremal state. For non-supersymmetric near-extremal black holes in Einstein gravity, with an AdS$_2$ throat, no such gap was found. Rather, at that energy scale, the spectrum exhibits a continuum of states, up to non-perturbative corrections. In this paper, we compute the partition function of near-BPS black holes in supergravity where the emergent, broken, symmetry is $PSU(1,1|2)$. To reliably compute this partition function, we show that the gravitational path integral can be reduced to that of a $\\mathcal N=4$ supersymmetric extension of the Schwarzian theory, which we define and exactly quantize. In contrast to the non-supersymmetric case, we find that black holes in supergravity have a mass gap and a large extremal black hole degeneracy consistent with the Bekenstein-Hawking area. Our results verify several string theory conjectures, concerning the scale of the mass gap and the counting of extremal micro-states.","external_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01953","cited_by_count":null,"metadata_source":"pith","metadata_fetched_at":"2026-07-10T06:46:52.237245+00:00","pith_arxiv_id":"2011.01953","created_at":"2026-05-09T06:55:40.197446+00:00","updated_at":"2026-07-10T06:46:52.237245+00:00","title_quality_ok":true,"display_title":"Heydeman, L","render_title":"Heydeman, L"},"hub":{"state":{"work_id":"06d08ede-739e-44a8-bbc0-7aa9ef9b0131","tier":"hub","tier_reason":"10+ Pith inbound or 1,000+ external citations","pith_inbound_count":16,"external_cited_by_count":null,"distinct_field_count":2,"first_pith_cited_at":"2025-09-18T18:00:00+00:00","last_pith_cited_at":"2026-07-09T13:40:33+00:00","author_build_status":"not_needed","summary_status":"needed","contexts_status":"needed","graph_status":"needed","ask_index_status":"not_needed","reader_status":"not_needed","recognition_status":"not_needed","updated_at":"2026-08-23T04:19:56.279258+00:00","tier_text":"hub"},"tier":"hub","role_counts":[{"context_role":"background","n":7}],"polarity_counts":[{"context_polarity":"background","n":5},{"context_polarity":"support","n":2}],"runs":{},"summary":{},"graph":{},"authors":[]}}