Stringy chaos and black hole microstates

Black holes have large classical entropy. The nature of the underlying microstates remains a longstanding subject of interest. Among other expected properties, these microstates are expected to be chaotic. Recently, it has been conjectured that they are also `fortuitous’: they change erratically as one tunes the parameters of the theory.

In this talk (based on work in progress), we introduce a toy model for supersymmetric black hole microstates derived from string theory. We explain why this toy model exhibits many features expected for black holes and show that its ground states are indeed `fortuitous’. We also sketch an argument suggesting that they exhibit chaotic behaviour.