Plane Wave Type II∗^* String Backgrounds

In this note we aim to study plane-wave limits of the solutions of type II$^*$ superstring theories. We consider Freund-Rubin type $dS_5\times H^5$ solutions of type IIB$^*$ theory and obtain a new kind of plane-wave solutions, we refer them as de Sitter plane-waves or Dpp-waves. Considering Hull's time-like T-duality we are able to map the Dpp wave solution to maximally supersymmetric Hpp-wave in IIB string theory and vice-versa.Comment: 10 page

Generalised Penrose Limits and PP-Waves

In this paper we construct generalised Penrose limits for the solutions of massive type IIA supergravity. We consider a Freund-Rubin type solution and apply these {\it massive} Penrose limits and obtain supersymmetric pp-wave which is a standard type IIA background. We point out that results in this paper are easily generalised for the cases of gauged supergravities.Comment: 13 pages; v2: references added, v3: minor corrections and modification

Topological Born-Infeld-dilaton black holes

We construct a new analytic solution of Einstein-Born-Infeld-dilaton theory in the presence of Liouville-type potentials for the dilaton field. These solutions describe dilaton black holes with nontrivial topology and nonlinear electrodynamics. Black hole horizons and cosmological horizons in these spacetimes, can be a two-dimensional positive, zero or negative constant curvature surface. The asymptotic behavior of these solutions are neither flat nor (A)dS. We calculate the conserved and thermodynamic quantities of these solutions and verify that these quantities satisfy the first law of black hole thermodynamics.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, references added, to appear in Phys. Lett.

M5-branes with 3/8 supersymmetry in pp-wave background

We construct M5-branes in pp-wave background and find that they preserve exactly half of the background pp-wave supersymmetries. We explicitly write down the standard as well as supernumerary Killing spinors and find that their respective numbers are also half of those for the pp-wave background. This is in line with the recent work of Dabholkar et.al. which shows half-supersymmetric D-branes can be constructed in Hpp-wave background.Comment: 10 pages, v2: misprints corrected and references added, v3: improved and more references, to appear in PL