Gravitational origin of index saddle degeneracy and one-form symmetry

by Gianmarco Esposto

Thursday 5 Mar 2026, 17:15 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

1/1-3 - Aula B (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia - Edificio Marzolo)

In a quantum theory of gravity, the thermodynamic properties of black holes are expected to emerge from an underlying microscopic statistical description. One of the major successes of AdS/CFT has been to provide such a description for certain classes of supersymmetric black holes. In this framework, a central quantity on the field-theory side is the superconformal index, a protected observable that counts supersymmetric states in certain four-dimensional theories. In an appropriate limit describing the black hole regime, the superconformal index develops a logarithmic contribution. From the field-theory perspective, this term is related to the presence of a discrete one-form symmetry.

In this talk, I will describe how this logarithmic contribution can be understood from the gravitational side, where the discrete symmetry is reproduced by studying black hole solutions in supergravity.