A gravitating Yang-Mills instanton

Abstract

We present an asymptotically flat, spherically symmetric, static, globally regular and horizonless solution of SU$(2)$-gauged $\mathcal{N}=1,d=5$ supergravity. The SU$(2)$ gauge field is that of the BPST instanton. We argue that this solution, analogous to the global monopoles found in $d=4$ $\mathcal{N}=2$ and $\mathcal{N}=4$ gauged supergravities, describes the field of a single string-theory object which does not contribute to the entropy of black holes when we add it to them and show that it is, indeed, the dimensional reduction on T$^{5}$ of the gauge 5-brane. We investigate how the energy of the solution is concentrated as a function of the instanton's scale showing that it never violates the hoop conjecture although the curvature grows unboundedly in the zero scale limit.