LAUSR

We investigate the possibility of using quasi-normal modes (QNMs) to probe the microscopic structure of two-dimensional (2D) anti-de Sitter (AdS 2 ) dilatonic black holes. We first extend previous results on the QNMs spectrum, found for external massless scalar perturbations, to the case of massive scalar perturbations. We find that the quasi-normal frequencies are purely imaginary and scale linearly with the overtone number. Motivated by this and extending previous results regarding Schwarzschild black holes, we propose a microscopic description of the 2D black hole in terms of a coherent state of N massless particles quantized on a circle, with occupation numbers sharply peaked on the characteristic QNMs frequency ω ̂ $$ \hat{\omega} $$ . We further model the black hole as a statistical ensemble of N decoupled quantum oscillators of frequency ω ̂ $$ \hat{\omega} $$ . This allows us to recover the Bekenstein-Hawking (BH) entropy S of the hole as the leading contribution to the Gibbs entropy for the set of oscillators, in the high-temperature regime, and to show that S = N . Additionally, we find sub-leading logarithmic corrections to the BH entropy. We further corroborate this microscopic description by outlining a holographic correspondence between QNMs in the AdS 2 bulk and the de Alfaro-Fubini-Furlan conformally invariant quantum mechanics. Our results strongly suggest that modelling a black hole as a coherent state of particles and as a statistical ensemble of decoupled harmonic oscillators is always a good approximation in the large black-hole mass, large overtone number limit.