International Journal of Modern Physics A c © World Scientific Publishing Company EXTREMAL BLACK HOLES, HOLOGRAPHY & COARSE GRAINING

I review some of the concepts at the crossroads of gravitational thermodynamics, holog-raphy and quantum mechanics. First, the origin of gravitational thermodynamics due to coarse graining of quantum information is exemplified using the half-BPS sector of N = 4 SYM and its LLM description in type IIB supergravity. The notion of black holes as effective geometries, its relation to the fuzzball programme and some of the puzzles raising for large black holes are discussed. Second, I review recent progress for extremal black holes, both microscopically, discussing a constituent model for stationary extremal non-bps black holes, and semiclassically, discussing the extremal black hole/CFT con-jecture. The latter is examined from the AdS3/CFT2 perspective. Third, I review the importance of the holographic principle to encode non-local gravity features allowing us to relate the gravitational physics of local observers with thermodynamics and the role causality plays in these arguments by identifying horizons (screens) as diathermic walls. I speculate with the emergence of an approximate CFT in the deep IR close to any horizon and its relation with an effective dynamical description of the degrees of freedom living on these holographic screens