Recent work has uncovered a correspondence between theories in anti-de Sitter
space, and those on its boundary. This has important implications for black
holes in string theory which have near-horizon AdS geometries. Using the
effective coupling to the boundary conformal field theory, I compute the
low-energy, s-wave absorption cross-sections for a minimally coupled scalar in
the near-extremal four- and five-dimensional black holes. The results agree
precisely with semi-classical gravity calculations. Agreement for fixed
scalars, and for the BTZ black hole, is also found.Comment: 10 pages, harvma
