Solitonic Strings and BPS Saturated Dyonic Black Holes

  • 6 March 1996
Abstract
We consider a six-dimensional solitonic string solution described by a conformal chiral null model with non-trivial $N=4$ superconformal transverse part. It can be interpreted as a five-dimensional dyonic solitonic string wound around a compact fifth dimension. The conformal model is regular with the short-distance (`throat') region equivalent to a WZW theory. At distances larger than the compactification scale the solitonic string reduces to a dyonic static spherically-symmetric black hole of toroidally compactified heterotic string. The new four-dimensional solution is parameterised by five charges, saturates the Bogomol'nyi bound and has nontrivial dilaton-axion field and moduli fields of two-torus. When acted by combined T- and S-duality transformations it serves as a generating solution for all the static spherically-symmetric BPS-saturated configurations of the low-energy heterotic string theory compactified on six-torus. Solutions with regular horizons have the global space-time structure of extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black holes with the non-zero thermodynamic entropy which depends only on conserved (quantised) charge vectors. The independence of the thermodynamic entropy on moduli and axion-dilaton couplings strongly suggests that it should have a microscopic interpretation as counting degeneracy of underlying string configurations. This interpretation is supported by arguments based on the corresponding six-dimensional conformal field theory. The expression for the level of the WZW theory describing the throat region implies a renormalisation of the string tension by a product of magnetic charges, thus relating the entropy and the number of oscillations of the solitonic string in compact directions.