Anti-de Sitter black holes in gauged N = 8 supergravity Original Research Article

We present new anti-de Sitter black hole solutions of gauged N = 8, SO(8) supergravity, which is the massless sector of the AdS4 × S70 vacuum of M-theory. By focusing on the U(1)4 Cartan subgroup, we find non-extremal 1, 2, 3 and 4 charge solutions. In the extremal limit, they may preserve up to 12, 14, 18 and 18 of the supersymmetry, respectively. In the limit of vanishing SO(8) coupling constant, the solutions reduce to the familiar black holes of the M4 × T7 vacuum, but have very different interpretation since there are no winding states on S7 and no U-duality. In contrast to the T7 compactification, moreover, we find no static multi-center solutions. Also in contrast, the S7 fields appear “already dualized” so that the 4 charges may be all electric or all magnetic rather than 2 electric and 2 magnetic. Curiously, however, the magnetic solutions preserve no supersymmetries. We conjecture that a subset of the extreme electric black holes preserving 12 the supersymmetry may be identified with the S7 Kaluza-Klein spectrum, with the non-abelian SO(8) quantum numbers provided by the fermionic zero-modes.