Published April 2007 | Version v1
Journal article

Twistors and black holes

  • 1. School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (United States)
  • 2. Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Hautes Energies, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6, 4 place Jussieu, F-75252 Paris cedex 05 (France)
  • 3. Institute for Theoretical Physics and Spinoza Institute, Utrecht University, 3508 TD Utrecht (Netherlands)

Description

Motivated by black hole physics in N = 2, D = 4 supergravity, we study the geometry of quaternionic-Kaehler manifolds M obtained by the c-map construction from projective special Kaehler manifolds Ms. Improving on earlier treatments, we compute the Kaehler potentials on the twistor space Z and Swann space S in the complex coordinates adapted to the Heisenberg symmetries. The results bear a simple relation to the Hesse potential Σ of the special Kaehler manifold Ms, and hence to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for BPS black holes. We explicitly construct the 'covariant c-map' and the 'twistor map', which relate real coordinates on M x CP1 (resp. M x R4/Z2) to complex coordinates on Z (resp. S). As applications, we solve for the general BPS geodesic motion on M, and provide explicit integral formulae for the quaternionic Penrose transform relating elements of H1(Z, O(-k)) to massless fields on M annihilated by first or second order differential operators. Finally, we compute the exact radial wave function (in the supergravity approximation) for BPS black holes with fixed electric and magnetic charges

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Journal of High Energy Physics
Journal Volume
4
Journal Issue
2007
Journal Page Range
p. 038
ISSN
1126-6708