Multidimensional Sigma-Model with Black Holes and p-Branes

The bosonic content of string theory in curved background of multidimensional structure with p-branes has a systematic geometrical description as an effective sigma-model of gravity in lower dimension (say 3+1) with additional interacting dilatonic and p-brane fields. If the target-space is locally symmetric, solutions with intersecting p-branes can be found. Some static solutions are p-brane generalizations of black holes (including the standard Reissner-Nordstr"om class), which allow the prediction of detectable features of the higher-dimensional p-brane geometry via scaling properties of black hole thermal properties. E.g. the Hawking temperature T_H depends critically on the p-brane intersection topology.