Baby universes and string theory

The description of 4D BPS black holes in terms of branes wrapped on various cycles in a Calabi-Yau space gives us the opportunity to study various issues in quantum gravity in a definite way by means of the worldvolume theory of the branes. In the particular example discussed here, there is a simple worldvolume description in terms of 2D Yang-Mills theory. The latter is an exactly solvable system of free fermions in one dimension. The exact answer for the free energy of this system can be written in a way that suggests an interpretation in terms of contributions from multiple (baby) universes