Higher-form symmetries in supergravity, scalar charges and black-hole thermodynamics
Abstract
Minimal 5-dimensional supergravity compactified on a circle gives the T model of supergravity, whose duality group is SL. 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 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 -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