Dynamics of D-brane Black Holes

We explore the interplay between black holes in supergravity and quantum field theories on the world-volumes of D-branes. A brief summary of black hole entropy calculations for D-brane black holes is followed by a detailed study of particle absorption by black holes whose string theory description involves D-branes intersecting along a string. A conformal field theory with large central charge describes the low-energy excitations of this string. The absorption cross-sections give rise to greybody factors in Hawking radiation processes which are characteristic of conformal field theory at finite temperature. Particle absorption by extremal three-branes is examined next, with particular attention to the implications for supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions. A fascinating duality between supergravity and gauge theory emerges from the study of these processes. Fields of supergravity are dual to local operators in the gauge theory. A non-renormalization theorem of N=4 gauge theory helps explain why certain aspects of the duality can be explored perturbatively. Anomalous dimensions of a large class of local operators in the gauge theory are shown to become large at strong 't Hooft coupling, signaling a possible simplification of N=4 gauge theory in this limit.