Lightcone Modular Bootstrap and Tauberian Theory: A Cardy-like Formula for Near-extremal Black Holes

We show that for a unitary modular invariant 2D CFT with central charge $c>1$ and having a nonzero twist gap in the spectrum of Virasoro primaries, for sufficiently large spin $J$, there always exist spin-$J$ operators with twist falling in the interval $(\frac{c-1}{12}-\epsilon ,\frac{c-1}{12}+\epsilon )$ with $\epsilon =O(J^{-1\mathrm{/}2}\log J)$. We establish that the number of Virasoro primary operators in such a window has a Cardy-like i.e. $\exp \left(2\pi \sqrt{\frac{(c-1)J}{6}}\right)$ growth. We make further conjectures on potential generalization to CFTs with conserved currents. A similar result is proven for a family of holographic CFTs with the twist gap growing linearly in $c$ and a uniform boundedness condition, in the regime $J\gg c^3\gg 1$. From the perspective of near-extremal rotating BTZ black holes (without electric charge), our result is valid when the Hawking temperature is much lower than the “gap temperature”.