English

Twistors and Black Holes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-10-27 v3 Differential Geometry

Abstract

Motivated by black hole physics in N=2, D=4 supergravity, we study the geometry of quaternionic-Kahler manifolds M obtained by the c-map construction from projective special Kahler manifolds M_s. Improving on earlier treatments, we compute the Kahler potentials on the twistor space Z and Swann space S in the complex coordinates adapted to the Heisenberg symmetries. The results bear a simple relation to the Hesse potential \Sigma of the special Kahler manifold M_s, and hence to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for BPS black holes. We explicitly construct the ``covariant c-map'' and the ``twistor map'', which relate real coordinates on M x CP^1 (resp. M x R^4/Z_2) to complex coordinates on Z (resp. S). As applications, we solve for the general BPS geodesic motion on M, and provide explicit integral formulae for the quaternionic Penrose transform relating elements of H^1(Z,O(-k)) to massless fields on M annihilated by first or second order differential operators. Finally, we compute the exact radial wave function (in the supergravity approximation) for BPS black holes with fixed electric and magnetic charges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0701214,
  title  = {Twistors and Black Holes},
  author = {Andrew Neitzke and Boris Pioline and Stefan Vandoren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0701214},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

47 pages, v2: typos corrected, reference added, v3: minor changes

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:40:33.915Z