Q-Balls Meet Fuzzballs: Non-BPS Microstate Geometries

TL;DR

This paper constructs a new family of non-extremal microstate geometries, called microstrata, using a Q-ball-inspired Ansatz, providing a proof of concept for this approach in supergravity and holography.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Q-ball-inspired method to find non-extremal microstate geometries, extending the superstrata framework to non-BPS solutions.

Findings

Successfully constructed three-parameter microstrata family.

Perturbative and numerical solutions show excellent agreement.

Solutions exhibit mode-dependent frequencies and non-normalizable modes at higher order.

Abstract

We construct a three-parameter family of non-extremal microstate geometries, or "microstrata," that are dual to states and deformations of the D1-D5 CFT. These families are non-extremal analogues of superstrata. We find these microstrata by using a Q-ball-inspired Ansatz that reduces the equations of motion to solving for eleven functions of one variable. We then solve this system both perturbatively and numerically and the results match extremely well. We find that the solutions have normal mode frequencies that depend upon the amplitudes of the excitations. We also show that, at higher order in perturbations, some of the solutions, having started with normalizable modes, develop a "non-normalizable" part, suggesting that the microstrata represent states in a perturbed form of the D1-D5 CFT. This paper is intended as a "Proof of Concept" for the Q-ball-inspired approach, and we will describe how it opens the way to many interesting follow-up calculations both in supergravity and in the dual holographic field theory.