Near Horizon Limits of Massless BTZ and Their CFT Duals

We consider the massless BTZ black hole and show that it is possible to take its "near horizon" limit in two distinct ways. The first one leads to a null self-dual orbifold of AdS3 and the second to a spacelike singular AdS3/Z_K orbifold in the large K limit, the "pinching orbifold". We show that from the dual 2d CFT viewpoint, the null orbifold corresponds to the p^+=0 sector of the Discrete Light-Cone Quantisation (DLCQ) of the 2d CFT where a chiral sector of the CFT is decoupled, while the pinching orbifold corresponds to taking an infinite mass gap limit in both the right and left sectors of the 2d CFT, essentially leaving us with the states L_0=\bar L_0=c/24 only. In the latter case, one can combine the near horizon limit with sending the 3d Planck length l_P to zero, or equivalently the dual CFT central charge c to infinity. We provide preliminary evidence that in that case some nontrivial dynamics may survive the limit.Comment: 22 pages, no figures, v2: minor improvements, references adde

EVH Black Holes, AdS3 Throats and EVH/CFT Proposal

Within class of generic black holes there are extremal black holes (with vanishing Hawking temperature T) and vanishing horizon area Ah, but with finite Ah/T ratio,the Extremal Vanishing Horizon (EVH) black holes. We study the near horizon limit of a four dimensional EVH black hole solution to a generic (gauged) Einstein-Maxwell dilaton theory and show that in the near horizon limit they develop a throat which is a pinching orbifold limit of AdS3. This is an extension of the well known result for extremal black holes the near horizon limit of which contains an AdS2 throat. We show that in the near EVH near horizon limit the pinching AdS3 factor turns to a pinching BTZ black hole and that this near horizon limit is indeed a decoupling limit. We argue that the pinching AdS3 or BTZ orbifold is resolved if the near horizon limit is accompanied by taking the 4d Newton constant G4 to zero such that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy S = Ah/(4G4) remains finite. We propose that in this limit the near horizon EVH black hole is dual to a 2d CFT. We provide pieces of evidence in support of the EVH/CFT correspondence and comment on its connection to the Kerr/CFT proposal and speculations how the EVH/CFT may be used to study generic e.g. Schwarzchild-type black holes.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures, JHEP styl