Probing the constituent structure of black holes

Based on recent ideas, we propose a framework for the description of black holes in terms of constituent graviton degrees of freedom. Within this formalism a large black hole can be understood as a bound state of N longitudinal gravitons. In this context black holes are similar to baryonic bound states in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which are described by fundamental quark degrees of freedom. As a quantitative tool we employ a quantum bound state description originally developed in QCD that allows to consider black holes in a relativistic Hartree-like framework. As an application of our framework we calculate the cross section for scattering processes between graviton emitters outside of a Schwarzschild black hole and absorbers in its interior, that is gravitons. We show that these scatterings allow to directly extract structural observables such as the momentum distribution of black hole constituents