arXiv subjects

David Kastor

Publications and source records attributed to David Kastor.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2004

Conserved gravitational charges from Yano tensors

The defining properties of Yano tensors naturally generalize those of Killing vectors to anti-symmetric tensor fields of arbitrary rank. We show how the Yano tensors of flat spacetime can be used to construct new, conserved gravitational charges for transverse asymptotically flat spacetimes. The relationship of these new charges to Yano tensors parallels that of ordinary ADM conserved charges to Killing vectors. Hence, we call them Y-ADM charges. A rank n Y-ADM charge is given by an integral over a co-dimension $n$ slice of spatial infinity. In particular, a rank (p+1) Y-ADM charge in a p-brane spacetime is given by an integral over only the D-(p+2) dimensional sphere surrounding the brane and may be regarded as an intensive property of the brane.

hep-th↗

arXiv2003

From wrapped M-branes to Calabi-Yau black holes and strings

We study a class of D=11 BPS spacetimes that describe M-branes wrapping supersymmetric 2 and 4-cycles of Calabi-Yau 3-folds. We analyze the geometrical significance of the supersymmetry constraints and gauge field equations of motion for these spacetimes. We show that the dimensional reduction to D=5 yields known BPS black hole and black string solutions of D=5, N=2 supergravity. The usual ansatz for the dimensional reduction is valid only in the linearized regime of slowly varying moduli and small gauge field strengths. Our identification of the massless D=5 modes with D=11 quantities extends beyond this regime and should prove useful in constructing non-linear ansatze for Calabi-Yau dimensional reductions of supergravity theories.

hep-th↗

arXiv2002

A Positive Energy Theorem for Asymptotically deSitter Spacetimes

We construct a set of conserved charges for asymptotically deSitter spacetimes that correspond to asymptotic conformal isometries. The charges are given by boundary integrals at spatial infinity in the flat cosmological slicing of deSitter. Using a spinor construction, we show that the charge associated with conformal time translations is necessarilly positive and hence may provide a useful definition of energy for these spacetimes. A similar spinor construction shows that the charge associated with the time translation Killing vector of deSitter in static coordinates has both positive and negative definite contributions. For Schwarzshild-deSitter the conformal energy we define is given by the mass parameter times the cosmological scale factor. The time dependence of the charge is a consequence of a non-zero flux of the corresponding conserved current at spatial infinity. For small perturbations of deSitter, the charge is given by the total comoving mass density.

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arXiv2000

Calibrations and Fayyazuddin-Smith Spacetimes

We show that a class of spacetimes introduced by Fayyazuddin and Smith to describe intersecting M5-branes admit a generalized Kahler calibration. Equipped with this understanding, we are able to construct spacetimes corresponding to further classes of calibrated $p$-brane world-volume solitons. We note that these classes of spacetimes also describe the fields of $p$-branes wrapping certain supersymmetric cycles of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

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arXiv2000

The Dynamics of Collapsing Monopoles and Regular Black Holes

We study the formation and stability of regular black holes by employing a thin shell approximation to the dynamics of collapsing magnetic monopoles. The core deSitter region of the monopole is matched across the shell to a Reissner-Nordstrom exterior. We find static configurations which are nonsingular black holes and also oscillatory trajectories about these static points that share the same causal structure. In these spacetimes the shell is always hidden behind the black hole horizon. We also find shell trajectories that pass through the asymptotically flat region and model collapse of a monopole to form a regular black hole. In addition there are trajectories in which the deSitter core encompasses a deSitter horizon and hence undergoes topological inflation. However, these always yield singular black holes and never have the shell passing through the aymptotically flat region. Although the regular black hole spacetimes satisfy the strong energy condition, they avoid the singularity theorems by failing to satisfy the genericity condition on the Riemann tensor. The regular black holes undergo a change in spatial topology in accordance with a theorem of Borde's.

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arXiv1999

Fully Localized Brane Intersections - The Plot Thickens

We study fully localized BPS brane solutions in classical supergravity using a perturbative approach to the coupled Born-Infeld/bulk supergravity system. We derive first order bulk supergravity fields for world-volume solitons corresponding to intersecting M2-branes and to a fundamental string ending on a D3-brane. One interesting feature is the appearance of certain off-diagonal metric components and corresponding components of the gauge potentials. Making use of a supersymmetric ansatz for the exact fields, we formulate a perturbative expansion which applies to $M2 \perp M2 (0), M5 \perp M5 (3)$ and $Dp \perp Dp (p-2)$ intersections. We find that perturbation theory qualitatively distinguishes between certain of these cases: perturbation theory breaks down at second order for intersecting M2-branes and D$p$-branes with $p\le 3$ while it is well behaved, at least to this order, for the remaining cases. This indicates that the behavior of the full non-linear intersecting Dp-brane solutions may be qualitatively different for $p \le 3$ than for $p \ge 4$, and that fully localized asymptotically flat solutions for $p \le 3$ may not exist. We discuss the consistency of these results with world-volume field theory properties.

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arXiv1999

Dynamics of the DBI Spike Soliton

We compare oscillations of a fundamental string ending on a D3-brane in two different settings: (1) a test-string radially threading the horizon of an extremal black D3-brane and (2) the spike soliton of the DBI effective action for a D3-brane. Previous work has shown that overall transverse modes of the test-string appear as l=0 modes of the transverse scalar fields of the DBI system. We identify DBI world-volume degrees of freedom that have dynamics matching those of the test-string relative transverse modes. We show that there is a map, resembling T-duality, between relative and overall transverse modes for the test-string that interchanges Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions and implies equality of the absorption coefficients for both modes. We give general solutions to the overall and relative transverse parts of the DBI coupled gauge and scalar system and calculate absorption coefficients for the higher angular momentum modes in the low frequency limit. We find that there is a nonzero amplitude for l>0 modes to travel out to infinity along the spike, demonstrating that the spike remains effectively 3+1-dimensional.

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arXiv1999

Electric Dipole Moment of a BPS Monopole

Monopole ``superpartner'' solutions are constructed by acting with finite, broken supersymmetry transformations on a bosonic N=2 BPS monopole. The terms beyond first order in this construction represent the backreaction of the the fermionic zero-mode state on the other fields. Because of the quantum nature of the fermionic zero-modes, the superpartner solution is necessarily operator valued. We extract the electric dipole moment operator and show that it is proportional to the fermion zero-mode angular momentum operator with a gyroelectric ratio g=2. The magnetic quadrupole operator is shown to vanish identically on all states. We comment on the usefulness of the monopole superpartner solution for a study of the long-range spin dependent dynamics of BPS monopoles.

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arXiv1998

BPS Force Balances via Spin-Spin Interactions

We study two systems of BPS solitons in which spin-spin interactions are important in establishing the force balances which allow static, multi-soliton solutions to exist. Solitons in the Israel-Wilson-Perjes (IWP) spacetimes each carry arbitrary, classical angular momenta. Solitons in the Aichelburg-Embacher "superpartner" spacetimes carry quantum mechanical spin, which originates in the zero-modes of the gravitino field of N=2 supergravity in an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom background. In each case we find a cancellation between gravitational spin-spin and magnetic dipole-dipole forces, in addition to the usual one between Newtonian gravitational attraction and Coulombic electrostatic repulsion. In both cases, we analyze the forces between two solitons by treating one of the solitons as a probe or test particle, with the appropriate properties, moving in the background of the other. In the IWP case, the equation of motion for a spinning test particle, originally due to Papapetrou, includes a coupling between the background curvature and the spin of the test particle. In the superpartner case, the relevant equation of motion follows from a kappa-symmetric superparticle action.

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arXiv1998

The Spin of the M2-Brane and Spin-Spin Interactions via Probe Techniques

The 256 dimensional M2-brane multiplet contains solitons of many different intrinsic spins. Using the broken supersymmetry transformations of the M2-brane, we find supergravity solutions which explicitly display these spins. This amounts to quantizing the fermionic zero modes and computing the back reaction on the metric and gauge potential. These spacetime fields are therefore operator valued and acquire a conventional classical meaning only after taking expectations in given BPS states. Our spinning spacetimes are not of the standard Kerr form -- there is a non-vanishing gravitino. Nevertheless, the solutions have angular momentum and magnetic dipole moments with a g-factor of 2. We use probe techniques to study scattering of spinning BPS M2-branes. The static interactions cancel between like-sign branes at leading order, but there are static spin-spin forces between branes and anti-branes. The general probe-background Lagrangian contains gravitational spin-spin and magnetic dipole-dipole forces, as well as gravitino exchanges which allow branes to change fermion number.

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arXiv1997

A Very Effective String Model?

Additional evidence is presented for a recently proposed effective string model, conjectured to hold throughout the parameter space of the basic 5 dimensional, triply charged black holes, which includes the effects of brane excitations, as well as momentum modes. We compute the low energy spacetime absorption coefficient $σ$ for the scattering of a triply-charged scalar field in the near extremal case, and conjecture an exact form for $σ$. It is shown that this form of $σ$ arises simply from the effective string model. This agreement encompasses both statistical factors coming from the Bose distributions of string excitations and a prefactor which depends on the effective string radius. An interesting feature of the effective string model is that the change in mass of the effective string system in an emission process is not equal to the change in the energies of the effective string excitations. If the model is valid, this may hold clues towards understanding back reaction due to Hawking radiation. A number of weak spots and open questions regarding the model are also noted.

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arXiv1997

Non-extreme Calabi-Yau Black Holes

Non-extreme black hole solutions of four dimensional, N=2 supergravity theories with Calabi-Yau prepotentials are presented, which generalize certain known double-extreme and extreme solutions. The boost parameters characterizing the nonextreme solutions must satisfy certain constraints, which effectively limit the functional independence of the moduli scalars. A necessary condition for being able to take certain boost parameters independent is found to be block diagonality of the gauge coupling matrix. We present a number of examples aimed at developing an understanding of this situation and speculate about the existence of more general solutions.

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arXiv1997

U-Duality, D-Branes and Black Hole Emission Rates: Agreements and Disagreements

An expression for the spacetime absorption coefficient of a scalar field in a five dimensional, near extremal black hole background is derived, which has the same form as that presented by Maldacena and Strominger, but is valid over a larger, U-duality invariant region of parameter space and in general disagrees with the corresponding D-brane result. We develop an argument, based on D-brane thermodynamics, which specifies the range of parameters over which agreement should be expected. For neutral emission, the spacetime and D-brane results agree over this range. However, for charged emission, we find disagreement in the `Fat Black Hole' regime, in which charge is quantized in smaller units on the brane, than in the bulk of spacetime. We indicate a possible problem with the D-brane model in this regime. We also use the Born approximation to study the high frequency limit of the absorption coefficient and find that it approaches unity, for large black hole backgrounds, at frequencies still below the string scale, again in disagreement with D-brane results.

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arXiv1995

Breaking Cosmic Strings without Monopoles

It is shown that topologically stable cosmic strings can, in fact, appear to end or to break, even in theories without monopoles. This can occur whenever the spatial topology of the universe is nontrivial. For the case of Abelian-Higgs strings, we describe the gauge and scalar field configurations necessary for a string to end on a black hole. We give a lower bound for the rate at which a cosmic string will break via black hole pair production, using an instanton calculation based on the Euclidean C-metric.

gr-qc↗

arXiv1994

Supersymmetry and Stationary Solutions in Dilaton-Axion Gravity

New stationary solutions of $4$-dimensional dilaton-axion gravity are presented, which correspond to the charged Taub-NUT and Israel-Wilson-Perjes (IWP) solutions of Einstein-Maxwell theory. The charged axion-dilaton Taub-NUT solutions are shown to have a number of interesting properties: i) manifest $SL(2,R)$ symmetry, ii) an infinite throat in an extremal limit, iii) the throat limit coincides with an exact CFT construction. The IWP solutions are shown to admit supersymmetric Killing spinors, when embedded in $d=4,N=4$ supergravity. This poses a problem for the interpretation of supersymmetric rotating solutions as physical ground states. In the context of $10$-dimensional geometry, we show that dimensionally lifted versions of the IWP solutions are dual to certain gravitational waves in string theory.

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arXiv1993

Particle Production and Positive Energy Theorems for Charged Black Holes in deSitter

We study quantum mechanical and classical stability properties of Reissner-Nordstrom deSitter spacetimes, which describe black holes with mass $M$ and charge $Q$ in a background with cosmological constant $Λ\ge 0$. There are two sources of particle production in these spacetimes; the black hole horizon and the cosmological horizon. A scattering calculation is done to compute the Hawking radiation in these spacetimes. We find that the flux from the black hole horizon equals the flux from the cosmological horizon, if and only if $|Q|=M$, indicating that this is a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. The spectrum, however, is not thermal. We also show that spacetimes containing a number of charge equal to mass black holes with $Λ\ge 0$, have supercovariantly constant spinors, suggesting that they may be minimum energy states in a positive energy construction. As a first step in this direction, we present a positive energy construction for asymptotically deSitter spacetimes with vanishing charge. Because the construction depends only on a spatial slice, our result also holds for spacetimes which are asymptotically Robertson-Walker.

gr-qc↗

arXiv1993

Testing Cosmic Censorship with Black Hole Collisions

There exists an upper limit on the mass of black holes when the cosmological constant $Λ$ is positive. We study the collision of two black holes whose total mass exceeds this limit. Our investigation is based on a recently discovered exact solution describing the collision of $Q=M$ black holes with $Λ> 0$. The global structure of this solution is analyzed. We find that if the total mass is less than the extremal limit, then the black holes coalesce. If it is greater, then a naked singularity forms to the future of a Cauchy horizon. However, the horizon is not smooth. Generically, there is a mild curvature singularity, which still allows geodesics to be extended. The implications of these results for cosmic censorship are discussed.

gr-qc↗

arXiv1992

Cosmological Multi-Black Hole Solutions

We present simple, analytic solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell equation, which describe an arbitrary number of charged black holes in a spacetime with positive cosmological constant $Λ$. In the limit $Λ=0$, these solutions reduce to the well known Majumdar-Papapetrou (MP) solutions. Like the MP solutions, each black hole in a $Λ>0$ solution has charge $Q$ equal to its mass $M$, up to a possible overall sign. Unlike the $Λ= 0$ limit, however, solutions with $Λ>0$ are highly dynamical. The black holes move with respect to one another, following natural trajectories in the background deSitter spacetime. Black holes moving apart eventually go out of causal contact. Black holes on approaching trajectories ultimately merge. To our knowledge, these solutions give the first analytic description of coalescing black holes. Likewise, the thermodynamics of the $Λ>0$ solutions is quite interesting. Taken individually, a $|Q|=M$ black hole is in thermal equilibrium with the background deSitter Hawking radiation. With more than one black hole, because the solutions are not static, no global equilibrium temperature can be defined. In appropriate limits, however, when the black holes are either close together or far apart, approximate equilibrium states are established.

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