Question

EDIT: I edited the question to reflect Moshe's objections. Please, look at it again.

It's apparently a black hole time around here so I decided to ask a question of my own.

After a few generic questions about black holes, I am wondering whether string theory is able to provide something beyond the usual semiclassical Hawking radiation talk. Feel free to provide an answer from the standpoint of other theories of quantum gravity but AFAIK none of the other theories has yet come close to dealing with these questions. That's why I focus on string theory.

So let's talk about micro black holes. They have extreme temperature, extreme curvature, and I guess they must be exceptional in other senses too. At some point the gravitational description of these objects breaks down and I imagine this kind of black hole could be more properly modeled like a condensate of some stringy stuff. So let's talk about fuzzballs instead of black holes.

What does that microscopic fuzzball model look like?
What does string theory tell us about the evaporation of those fuzzballs? Is the Hawking radiation still the main effect (as for the regular black holes) or do other phenomena take over at some point?
Also feel free to add any other established results regarding black hole decay (as Jeff did with information preservation).

Answer 1

Moshe's answer gets the main point across. If you're interested in trying to learn something more detailed, here's a thought about where you might start. (I'm not even close to expert on these matters, but this is something that I've found readable and worthwhile.)

There's an interesting thread of literature including http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9309145 by Susskind and http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9612146 by Horowitz and Polchinski, along with other papers that those might lead you to. The idea is that free strings have a certain entropy, in the sense that for a given mass, there are many different combinations of oscillator modes you can turn on to find a string state of that mass. The string energy is proportional to its length, and a typical string of a given energy looks roughly like a random walk of a particular length. Once you turn on a coupling, at some point some of these states will become black holes, because their energy is contained in a region smaller than their Schwarzschild radius. For a given mass, a black hole state also has some entropy. There are various consistency checks you can do on the way these things scale, to see that it's sensible to talk about a sort of smooth transition between string states and black hole states if you fix the energy and vary the coupling.

There are more technical and more precise papers in the literature on black hole entropy and microstate counting, but for a non-expert like me this particular thread of literature seems interesting because it relies on parametric scaling laws that are pretty readily comprehensible, and paints a relatively clear picture of the physics.