Thursday, January 25, 2007

Twistors' Revenge



One of the recent (Jan 23) jewels on the arxiv is Andrew Neitzke, Boris Pioline and Stefan Vandoren's "Twistors and Black Holes" paper. It seems quaternionic-Kahler manifolds are all the rage now.

Twistors and Black Holes

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."

2 comments:

Kea said...

Good to see you are blogging! I will check out this paper next week when I'm back in Godzone (NZ).

CarlBrannen said...

Well I got the Java to find the solutions to the Koide equation over non Hermitian PIs, and they all had the electron mass as zero, just like the single Hermitian solution. That would be Nature 197, Carl 0. (There will be a rematch.)

Glad to see another post on your blog. I just put up a post on the subject of pocketknives.