D-brane Approach to Black Hole Quantum Mechanics

Strominger and Vafa have used D-brane technology to identify and precisely count the degenerate quantum states responsible for the entropy of certain extremal, BPS-saturated black holes. Here we give a Type-II D-brane description of a class of extremal {\it and} non-extremal five-dimensional Reissner-Nordstr\"om solutions and identify a corresponding set of degenerate D-brane configurations. We use this information to do a string theory calculation of the entropy, radiation rate and ``Hawking'' temperature. The results agree perfectly with standard Hawking results for the corresponding nearly extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes. Although these calculations suffer from open-string strong coupling problems, we give some reasons to believe that they are nonetheless qualitatively reliable. In this optimistic scenario there would be no ``information loss'' in black hole quantum evolution.