Anti-de Sitter black holes, perfect fluids and holography

We consider asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes in d-spacetime dimensions in the thermodynamically stable regime. We show that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy and its leading order corrections due to thermal fluctuations are reproduced by a weakly interacting fluid of bosons and fermions ('dual gas') in Delta = alpha(d - 2) + 1 spacetime dimensions, where the energy-momentum dispersion relation for the constituents of the fluid is assumed to be epsilon = kappap(alpha). We examine implications of this result for entropy bounds and the holographic hypothesis.