Black hole microstates from the worldsheet

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes a class of string theory models describing black hole microstates, deriving quantization conditions that identify the complete set of consistent non-BPS solutions related to the JMaRT family.

Contribution

It provides a detailed worldsheet description of black hole microstate geometries, establishing quantization and geometric constraints that uniquely identify the JMaRT solutions and their limits.

Findings

Derived quantization conditions for gauging parameters.

Identified the complete set of consistent backgrounds as JMaRT solutions.

Constructed new non-BPS supergravity solutions with NS5 branes.

Abstract

Recently an exact worldsheet description of strings propagating in certain black hole microstate geometries was constructed in terms of null-gauged WZW models. In this paper we consider a family of such coset models, in which the currents being gauged are specified by a set of parameters that a priori take arbitrary values. We show that consistency of the spectrum of the worldsheet CFT implies a set of quantisation conditions and parity restrictions on the gauging parameters. We also derive these constraints from an independent geometrical analysis of smoothness, absence of horizons and absence of closed timelike curves. This allows us to prove that the complete set of consistent backgrounds in this class of models is precisely the general family of (NS5-decoupled) non-BPS solutions known as the JMaRT solutions, together with their various (BPS and non-BPS) limits. We clarify several aspects of these backgrounds by expressing their six-dimensional solutions explicitly in terms of five non-negative integers and a single length-scale. Finally we study non-trivial two-charge limits, and exhibit a novel set of non-BPS supergravity solutions describing bound states of NS5 branes carrying momentum charge.