Geroch Group Description of Black Holes

Abstract

On one hand the Geroch group allows one to associate spacetime independent matrices with gravitational configurations that effectively only depend on two coordinates. This class includes stationary axisymmetric four- and five-dimensional black holes. On the other hand, a recently developed inverse scattering method allows one to factorize these matrices to explicitly construct the corresponding spacetime configurations. In this work we demonstrate the construction as well as the factorization of Geroch group matrices for a wide class of black hole examples. In particular, we obtain the Geroch group SL(3,R) matrices for the five-dimensional Myers-Perry and Kaluza-Klein black holes and the Geroch group SU(2,1) matrix for the four-dimensional Kerr-Newman black hole. We also present certain non-trivial relations between the Geroch group matrices and charge matrices for these black holes.