Timelike Duality

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality transformations of stationary solutions in low energy string theory with respect to timelike symmetry, revealing that many duals have negative mass or energy, challenging conventional expectations.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of timelike duality for stationary solutions in string theory and analyzes the physical implications of these duals, including negative energy configurations.

Findings

Duals of positive mass solutions often have nonpositive energies.

Many dual solutions correspond to negative mass black strings and negative energy plane waves.

An argument suggests that the nonpositive energy result may not be universal.

Abstract

Several stationary solutions of the low energy string equations are dualized with respect to their timelike symmetry. Many of the duals have simple physical interpretations. Those of the nonextremal three dimensional black hole and black string are negative mass black strings. The extremal cases of these, and extremal higher dimensional black strings also, give negative energy plane fronted waves. In fact, all of the duals of positive mass solutions that will be considered here have nonpositive energies, but an argument is given which suggests that this is not true in general.