Duality between electric and magnetic black holes
- Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Silver Street, Cambridge CB3 9EW (United Kingdom)
A number of attempts have recently been made to extend the conjectured {ital S} duality of Yang-Mills theory to gravity. Central to these speculations has been the belief that electrically and magnetically charged black holes, the solitons of quantum gravity, have identical quantum properties. This is not obvious, because, although duality is a symmetry of the classical equations of motion, it changes the sign of the Maxwell action. Nevertheless, we show that the chemical potential and charge projection that one has to introduce for electric but not magnetic black holes exactly compensate for the difference in action in the semiclassical approximation. In particular, we show that the pair production of electric black holes is not a runaway process, as one might think if one just went by the action of the relevant instanton. We also comment on the definition of the entropy in cosmological situations, and show that we need to be more careful when defining the entropy than we are in an asymptotically flat case.
- OSTI ID:
- 130744
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review, D, Journal Name: Physical Review, D Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 52; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Mon Aug 15 00:00:00 EDT 1994
· Physical Review, D (Particles Fields); (United States)
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OSTI ID:7015812