Microscopic Origin of the Entropy of Astrophysical Black Holes.

We construct an infinite family of microstates for black holes in Minkowski spacetime which have effective semiclassical descriptions in terms of collapsing dust shells in the black hole interior. Quantum mechanical wormholes cause these states to have exponentially small, but universal, overlaps. We show that these overlaps imply that the microstates span a Hilbert space of log dimension equal to the event horizon area divided by four times the Newton constant, explaining the statistical origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

Monodromy Inflation in the Strong Coupling Regime of the Effective Field Theory.

We present a simple effective field theory formulation of a general family of single-field flux monodromy models for which strong coupling effects at large field values can flatten the potential and activate higher-derivative operators. Both of these effects can suppress the tensor amplitude. These models are radiatively and nonperturbatively stable and can sustain ≳60 e folds of inflation. The dynamics combines features of both large-field chaotic inflation and k inflation. Reducing the tensor-scalar ratio below the observational bound r≲0.1 while keeping the scalar spectral index n_{s} within experimental bounds either yields equilateral non-Gaussianity f_{NL}^{eq}≃O(1), close to the current observational bounds, or gives very small r.