Vacuum Polarization of STU Black Holes and their Subtracted Geometry Limit

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vacuum polarization of a scalar field at the horizons of four-charge STU black holes, comparing standard and subtracted geometries, revealing their differences and similarities across various limits.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of vacuum polarization in standard and subtracted black hole geometries, including new solutions and a closed-form Green's function.

Findings

Vacuum polarization matches in BPS limit

Opposite signs in extremal Kerr limit

Positive polarization throughout interpolating solutions

Abstract

We study the vacuum polarization of a massless minimally coupled scalar field at the horizon of four-charge STU black holes. We compare the results for the standard asymptotically flat black holes and for the black holes obtained in the "subtracted limit", both in the general static case and at the horizon pole for the general rotating case. The original and the subtracted results are identical only in the BPS limit, and have opposite sign in the extremal Kerr limit. We also compute the vacuum polarization on the static solutions that interpolate between both the original and the subtracted case through a solution-generating transformation and show that the vacuum polarization stays positive throughout the interpolating solution. In the Appendix we provide a closed-form solution for the Green's function on general (static or rotating) subtracted black hole geometries.