Supertubes in Bubbling Backgrounds: Born-Infeld Meets Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper compares Born-Infeld probe analysis with full supergravity solutions for supertubes in three-charge backgrounds, providing evidence for infinite-parameter microstate geometries and exploring entropy enhancement and black hole embeddings.

Contribution

It demonstrates the equivalence of Born-Infeld and supergravity descriptions of supertubes and explores their role in microstate geometries and entropy calculations.

Findings

Born-Infeld and supergravity descriptions agree on supertube physics

Supertubes can depend on arbitrary functions, indicating infinite microstate parameters

Entropy can be significantly enhanced, with charges larger than asymptotic charges

Abstract

We discuss two ways in which one can study two-charge supertubes as components of generic three-charge, three-dipole charge supergravity solutions. The first is using the Born-Infeld action of the supertubes, and the second is via the complete supergravity solution. Even though the Born-Infeld description is only a probe approximation, we find that it gives exactly the same essential physics as the complete supergravity solution. Since supertubes can depend on arbitrary functions, our analysis strengthens the evidence for the existence of three-charge black-hole microstate geometries that depend on an infinite set of parameters, and sets the stage for the computation of the entropy of these backgrounds. We examine numerous other aspects of supertubes in three-charge, three-dipole charge supergravity backgrounds, including chronology protection during mergers, the contribution of supertubes to the charges and angular momenta, and the enhancement of their entropy. In particular, we find that entropy enhancement affects supertube fluctuations both along the internal and the spacetime directions, and we prove that the charges that give the enhanced entropy can be much larger than the asymptotic charges of the solution. We also re-examine the embedding of five-dimensional black rings in Taub-NUT, and show that in different coordinate patches a ring can correspond to different four-dimensional black holes. Last, but not least, we show that all the three-charge black hole microstate geometries constructed so far can be embedded in AdS_3 x S^3, and hence can be related to states of the D1-D5 CFT.