Effective Conformal Descriptions of Black Hole Entropy

Abstract

It is no longer considered surprising that black holes have temperatures and entropies. What remains surprising, though, is the universality of these thermodynamic properties: their exceptionally simple and general form, and the fact that they can be derived from many very different descriptions of the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. I review the proposal that this universality arises from an approximate conformal symmetry, which permits an effective "conformal dual" description that is largely independent of the microscopic details.

27 pages; solicited review article, to appear in Entropy