Phases of Supersymmetric Ground States in $AdS_4$

Abstract

We construct the phase diagram of supersymmetric ground states in AdS$_4\times S^7$ supergravity. BPS black holes exist only when the conserved charges satisfy a certain non-linear constraint. For other charge sectors, we propose two component configurations comprised of a core black hole that carries macroscopic entropy, and a gas that carries a macroscopic fraction of the charge. The superconformal index counts ground states only modulo a linear constraint on the charges. Each index line includes a pure BPS black hole but we find that, when differences between R-charge exceed a certain threshold, the index is dominated by a two component configuration. We illuminate this result by studying the gravitational path integral in Euclidean signature, as function of supersymmetric boundary conditions. We find that a pure BPS black hole saddle dominates the index when the R-charges are comparable, but not when they differ sufficiently. The region where the Euclidean path integral becomes unstable is precisely where two component configurations dominate the index. We show that the KSW criteria are insensitive to this instability.