English

Nonextremal black holes are BPS

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v3

Abstract

Extremal charged black holes are BPS solutions. It is commonly thought that their nonextremal counterparts are not. Further, experience with BPS solutions in flat spacetime suggests that all BPS solutions are supersymmetric; i.e. that they are invariant under some supersymmetry charges of either the original field theory or an appropriately extended version thereof. Using nonextremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes as counterexamples, we show that neither of these expectations is universally valid. These black holes correspond to a one-parameter family of BPS solutions. By showing that, subject to one very plausible assumption, no generalized Killing spinor can be constructed for these, we show that there is no supergravity theory for which these BPS solutions preserve a fraction of the supersymmetry, nor is there an associated Witten-Nester positive energy bound.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0612308,
  title  = {Nonextremal black holes are BPS},
  author = {Christopher M. Miller and Koenraad Schalm and Erick J. Weinberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0612308},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

LaTeX, 15 pages. v2 Discussion in sec 2.3 amended, small corrections, reference added. v3 (PRD version) Clarifications, corrections and references added. Section 3.2 partly rewritten and expanded, and assumption clarified

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:40:10.844Z