Black holes and fourfolds

Abstract

We establish a relation between the structure governing four- and five-dimensional black holes and multicenter solutions on the one hand and Calabi-Yau flux compactifications of M-theory and type IIB string theory on the other hand, for both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric solutions. We find that the known BPS and almost-BPS multicenter black hole solutions can be interpreted as GKP compactifications with (2,1) and (0,3) imaginary self-dual flux. We also show that the most general GKP compactification leads to new classes of BPS and non-BPS multicenter solutions. We explore how these solutions fit into N = 2 truncations, and elucidate how supersymmetry becomes camouflaged. As a necessary tool in our exploration we show how the fields in the largest N = 2 truncation fit inside the six-torus compactification of eleven-dimensional supergravity. © 2012 SISSA.