Black-Hole Microstates in String Theory : Black is the Color but Smooth are the Geometries?

Black holes are produced by gravitational collapse of supermassive stars and consist of a spacetime singularity dressed by a horizon from which nothing can escape. They lie at the common theoretical border between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, making them the main theoretical and experimental laboratory for testing quantum theories of gravity as String theory. The entropy of a black hole is huge, of the order of its mass squared. As any entropic object, a microscopic description in terms of large degeneracy of states should exist. Moreover, black hole evaporates through thermal Hawking's radiation and the information in the interior seems lost, that compromises the unitary principle, a cornerstone of Quantum Mechanics. Therefore, String Theory must provide the degrees of freedom necessary to describe the microstate nature of black holes, it must also find a mechanism resolving the singularity and the information loss paradox. This thesis addresses black-hole physics through the lens of the fuzzball proposal and the microstate geometry program. The major part of the discussion will be conducted in the low-energy limit of String Theory, that is in Supergravity. The proposal states that there exist "eS" horizonless non-singular solutions that resemble a black hole at large distance but differ in the vicinity of the horizon. Based on this statement, the classical black-hole solution corresponds to the average description of a system of solutions which match the black-hole geometry outside the horizon but cap off as ``fuzzy" smooth geometries in the infrared. The proposal leads to several questions: How is the singularity resolved? Can "eS" such geometries be built in Supergravity? How does the information escape from the ensemble of microstates?The thesis is decomposed in three parts. The first part introduces the basic materials and gives a review of the microstate geometry program. The second part gathers five works that all consist in constructing large classes of smooth horizonless microstate geometries of supersymmetric or non-supersymmetric black holes. The last part review two works. One is investigating the scattering process in microstate geometries. This helps to elucidate how unitarity is restored and how information escapes from black-hole backgrounds. The second one addresses the role of microstate geometries in the context of the AdS2/CFT1 correspondence and gives a beginning of proof for the fuzzball proposal.