English

Higher-form symmetries in supergravity, scalar charges and black-hole thermodynamics

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-12-30 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Minimal 5-dimensional supergravity compactified on a circle gives the T3^{3} model of N=2,d=4\mathcal{N}=2,d=4 supergravity, whose duality group is SL(2,R)(2,\mathbb{R}). We study exhaustively the relations between all the local and global symmetries of both theories and between the corresponding conserved currents and charges, including the on-shell closed generalized Komar charges associated to isometries. We find that the 2-dimensional subgroup of SL(2,R)(2,\mathbb{R}) that does not include electric-magnetic transformations is realized as a higher-form symmetry group that acts on the 5-dimensional metric and vector field. Using the generalized Komar charges we compute the Smarr formulas for black holes, showing that they are identical once the relations between all the 5- and 4-dimensional thermodynamical quantities are taken into account, which is only possible if certain constraints on the fields are satisfied. We notice that on-shell closed 5-dimensional 3-form charges give, upon dimensional reduction, on-shell closed 3-form currents and 2-form charges. The dimensional reduction of the 5-dimensional generalized Komar 3-form charge associated to a Killing vector gives a new 4-dimensional on-shell closed 3-form current which must be associated to a new global symmetry of the theory when it admits that Killing vector. Some of the results that we have derived are valid for theories of Einstein--Maxwell-like theories of (p+1)(p+1)-forms with Chern--Simons terms, which includes 11-dimensional supergravity as a particular example.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.22565,
  title  = {Higher-form symmetries in supergravity, scalar charges and black-hole thermodynamics},
  author = {Gabriele Barbagallo and José Luis V. Cerdeira and Carmen Gómez-Fayrén and Patrick Meessen and Tomás Ortín},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.22565},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Latex paper, 91 pages, no figures