Kaluza-Klein Black Holes in String Theory

Non-supersymmetric black holes carrying both electric and magnetic charge with respect to a single Kaluza-Klein gauge field have much in common with supersymmetric black holes. Angular momentum conservation and other general physics principles underlies some of their basic features. Kaluza-Klein black holes are interpreted in string theory as bound states of D6-branes and D0-branes. The microscopic theory reproduces the full nonlinear mass formula of the extremal black holes.Comment: 11 pages; to appear in the proceedings of PASCOS'9

Attractors and Black Rings

The attractor mechanism is usually thought of as the fixing of the near horizon moduli of a BPS black hole in terms of conserved charges measured at infinity. Recent progress in understanding BPS solutions in five dimensions indicates that this is an incomplete story. Moduli can instead be fixed in terms of dipole charges, and their corresponding values can be found by extremizing a certain attractor function built out of these charges. BPS black rings provide an example of this phenomenon. We give a general derivation of the attractor mechanism in five dimensions based on the recently developed classification of BPS solutions. This analysis shows when it is the dipole charges versus the conserved charges that fix the moduli. It also yields explicit expressions for the fixed moduli.Comment: 18 pages, Harvma

U(1) Charges and Moduli in the D1-D5 System

The decoupling limit of the D1-D5 system compactified on T^4\times S^1 has a rich spectrum of U(1) charged excitations. Even though these states are not BPS in the limit, BPS considerations determine the mass and the semiclassical entropy for a given charge vector. The dependence of the mass formula on the compactification moduli situates the symmetric orbifold Sym^N(T^4) x T^4 conformal field theory in the moduli space. A detailed analysis of the global identifications of the moduli space yields a picture of multiple weak-coupling limits - one for each factorization of N into D1 and D5 charges d1 and d5=N/d1 - joined through regions of strong coupling in the CFT moduli space.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figure; v2: ref added, typos correcte

On D-Branes and Black Holes in Four Dimensions

We find extremal four dimensional black holes with finite area constructed entirely from intersecting D-branes. We argue that the microscopic degeneracy of these configurations agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula. The absence of solitonic objects in these configurations may make them useful for dynamical studies of black holes.Comment: 10pp. Reference adde

Divergences and Boundary Modes in N=8 Supergravity

We reconsider the one loop divergence of ${\cal N}=8$ supergravity in four dimensions. We compute the finite effective potential of ${\cal N}=8$ anti-deSitter supergravity and interpret it as logarithmic running of the cosmological constant. We find that quantum inequivalence between fields that are classically dual is due to boundary modes in AdS$_4$. Some subtleties are traced to the difference between the Euler characteristic of global and thermal AdS$_4$.Comment: 17 page