## 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."