Bert Vercnocke

Non-extremal Black Hole Microstates: Fuzzballs of Fire or Fuzzballs of Fuzz ?

A bstractWe construct the first family of microstate geometries of near-extremal black holes, by placing metastable supertube probes inside certain scaling supersymmetric smooth microstate geometries. These fuzzballs differ from the classical black hole solution macroscopically at the horizon scale, and for certain probes the fluctuations between various fuzzballs will be visible as thermal noise far away from the horizon. We discuss whether these fuzzballs appear to infalling observers as fuzzballs of fuzz or as fuzzballs of fire. The existence of these solutions suggests that the singularity of non-extremal black holes is resolved all the way to the outer horizon and this “backwards in time” singularity resolution can shed light on the resolution of spacelike cosmological singularities.

Metastable supertubes and non-extremal black hole microstates

A bstractWe study the dynamics of supertubes in smooth bubbling geometries with three charges and three dipole charges that can describe black holes, black rings and their microstates. We find the supertube Hamiltonian in these backgrounds and show that there exist metastable supertube configurations, that can decay into supersymmetric and nonsupersymmetric ones via brane-flux annihilation. We also find stable non-supersymmetric configurations. Both the metastable and the stable non-supersymmetric configuration are expected to describe microstate geometries for non-extremal black holes, and we discuss the implication of their existence for the fuzzball proposal.

A first-order formalism for timelike and spacelike brane solutions

We show that the construction of BPS-type equations for non-extremal black holes due to Miller et. al. can be extended to branes of arbitrary dimension and, more importantly, to time-dependent solutions. We call these first-order equations fake- or pseudo-BPS equations in light of the formalism that has been developed for domain wall and cosmological solutions of gravity coupled to scalar fields. We present the fake/pseudo-BPS equations for all stationary branes (timelike branes) and all time-dependent branes (spacelike branes) of an Einstein-dilaton-p-form system in arbitrary dimensions.

New instability of non-extremal black holes: spitting out supertubes

A bstractWe search for stable bound states of non-extremal rotating three-charge black holes in five dimensions (Cvetic-Youm black holes) and supertubes. We do this by studying the potential of supertube probes in the non-extremal black hole background and find that generically the marginally bound state of the supersymmetric limit becomes metastable and disappears with non-extremality (higher temperature). However near extremality there is a range of parameters allowing for stable bound states, which have lower energy than the supertube-black hole merger. Angular momentum is crucial for this effect. We use this setup in the D1-D5 decoupling limit to map a thermodynamic instability of the CFT (a new phase which is entropically dominant over the black hole phase) to a tunnelinginstability of the black hole towards the supertube-black hole bound state. This generalizes the results of [1], which mapped an entropy enigma in the bulk to the dual CFT in a supersymmetric setup.

Constrained superfields on metastable anti-D3-branes

A bstractWe study the effect of brane polarization on the supersymmetry transformations of probe anti-D3-branes at the tip of a Klebanov-Strassler throat geometry. As is well known, the probe branes can polarize into NS5-branes and decay to a supersymmetric state by brane-flux annihilation. The effective potential has a metastable minimum as long as the number of anti-D3-branes is small compared to the number of flux quanta. We study the reduced four-dimensional effective NS5-brane theory and show that in the metastable minimum supersymmetry is non-linearly realized to leading order, as expected for spontaneously broken supersymmetry. However, a strict decoupling limit of the higher order corrections in terms of a standard nilpotent superfield does not seem to exist. We comment on the possible implications of these results for more general low-energy effective descriptions of inflation or de Sitter vacua.

A New Class of de Sitter Vacua in Type IIB Large Volume Compactifications

A bstractWe construct a new class of metastable de Sitter vacua of flux compactifications of type IIB string theory. These solutions provide a natural extension of the ‘Large Volume Scenario’ anti-de Sitter vacua, and can analogously be realised at parametrically large volume and weak string coupling, using standard N

Relating chronology protection and unitarity through holography

\mathcal{N}

Black Holes in String Theory

= 1 supergravity. For these new vacua, a positive vacuum energy is achieved from the inclusion of a small amount of flux-induced supersymmetry breaking in the complex structure and axio-dilaton sector, and no additional ‘uplift’ contribution (e.g. from anti-branes) is required. We show that the approximate no-scale structure of the effective theory strongly influences the spectrum of the stabilised moduli: one complex structure modulus remains significantly lighter than the supersymmetry breaking scale, and metastability requires only modest amounts of tuning. After discussing these general results, we provide a recipe for constructing de Sitter vacua on a given compactification manifold, and give an explicit example of a de Sitter vacuum for the compactification on the Calabi-Yau orientifold realised in ℂℙ111694