The Emergence of an Effective two - dimensional Quantum Description from the study of Critical Phenomena in Black Holes

We study the occurrence of critical phenomena in four - dimensional, rotating and charged black holes, derive the critical exponents and show that they fulfill the scaling laws. Correlation functions critical exponents and Renormalization Group considerations assign an effective (spatial) dimension, $d=2$, to the system. The two - dimensional Gaussian approximation to critical systems is shown to reproduce all the black hole's critical exponents. Higher order corrections (which are always relevant) are discussed. Identifying the two - dimensional surface with the event horizon and noting that generalization of scaling leads to conformal invariance and then to string theory, we arrive to 't Hooft's string interpretation of black holes. From this, a model for dealing with a coarse grained black hole quantization is proposed. We also give simple arguments that lead to a rough quantization of the black hole mass in units of the Planck mass, i. e. $M\simeq{1\over\sqrt{2}}M_{pl} \sqrt{l}$ with a $l$ positive integer and then, from this result, to the proportionality between quantum entropy and area.