Black holes in supergravity

Abstract

A brief review is given of the use of duality symmetries to form orbits of Super gravity black-hole solutions and their relation to extremal (i.e. BPS) solutions at the limits of such orbits. An important technique in this analysis uses a timelike dimensional reduction and exchanges the stationary black-hole problem for a nonlinear sigma-model problem. Families of BPS solutions are characterized by nilpotent orbits under the duality symmetries, based upon a tri-graded or penta-graded decomposition of the corresponding duality group algebra.