Strings, black holes and conformal field theory

The SL(2,R)/U(1) gauged Wess-Zumino-Witten model is an exact conformal field theory describing a black hole in two-dimensional space-time. The free field approach of Bershadsky and Kutasov is a suitable formulation of this CFT in order to compute physically interesting quantities of this black hole. We find the space-time interpretation of this model for k=9/4 and show that it reproduces the metric and the dilaton found by Dijkgraaf, E.~Verlinde and H.~Verlinde in the mini-superspace approximation. We compute the two- and three-point functions of tachyons interacting in the black hole background and analyse in detail the form of the four-point tachyon scattering amplitude. We discuss the connection to the c=1 matrix model and the deformed matrix model of Jevicki and Yoneya.