Black hole attractors and gauge theories

This thesis is devoted to the study of supersymmetric black holes that arise from string compactifications. We begin by studying the R 2 corrections to the entropy of two solutions of five dimensional supergravity, the supersymmetric black ring and the spinning black hole. Using Wald's formula we compute the R2 corrections to the entropy of the black ring and BMPV black hole.;We study N D4-branes wrapping a 4 cycle and M DO-branes on the quintic. For N D4-branes, we resolve the naive mismatch between the moduli space of the Higgs branch of the gauge theory and the moduli of a degree N hypersurface which the D4-brane wraps. The degree N surface must admit a holomorphic divisor and is a determinantal variety. Adding a single DO brane to probe the deformed geometry, we recover the determinant equation from F and D flatness condition which was previously discovered from a classical geometry approach.;We next generalize the qunitic story for Calabi-Yau manifolds arising from complete intersections in toric varieties. We recover the moduli space of N D4-branes in terms of the moduli space of a U( N) x U(N) gauge theory with bi-fundamentals com ing from a D6 - D6 system. We also recast the tachyon condensation of the D6 - D6 system in the language of open string gauged linear sigma model. We obtain the determinant equation from F-term constraints arising from a boundary coupling.;We set out to understand the Ooguri-Strominger-Vafa conjecture directly in the D4-DO black hole attractor geometry. We show that the lift to the euclidean IIA attractor geometry gives a complexified M-theory geometry whose asymptotic boundary is a torus. Employing AdS3/CFT 2 duality, we argue that the string partition function computes the elliptic genus of the Maldacena-Strominger-Witten conformal field theory. We evaluate the IIA partition function using the Green-Schwarz formalism and show that it gives ZtopZ top, coming from instantons and anti-instantons respectively.;Finally, we determine the spectrum of free, large N, SU( N) Yang Mills theory on S3 by decomposing its thermal partition function into characters of the irreducible representations of the conformal group SO(4, 2).