Hidden Conformal Symmetries of Five-Dimensional Black Holes

Abstract

Recently it was shown by Castro, Maloney and Strominger (CMS) that 4D Kerr black holes have a "hidden" conformal symmetry. Using some old results of Cvetic and Larsen, I show that this result is very likely to hold also for the most general black holes in five dimensions arising from heterotic/type II string theory. In particular, we show how the wave equation in these geometries in the "near region" can be written in terms of SL(2,R) X SL(2,R) Casimirs. For the special case when the black hole has two spins but no U(1) charges, detailed matches for entropy and absorption cross sections between CFT and geometry are found. The black holes we consider need not be close to extremality.