Proca-type Hair of Rotating Black Holes in Higher Dimensions

Abstract

We show that spacetime symmetries on any background give rise to stealth vector fields obeying Proca-type equations supplemented by curvature terms. This observation, which is true for solutions of any theory of gravity and with arbitrary matter content, effectively promotes spacetime symmetries to "physical fields" whose characteristic property is that their backreaction on the geometry vanishes. In particular, this allows one to construct exact Proca hair charged and magnetized rotating black holes in all dimensions. In fact, such a construction is not limited to Killing vector fields and equally works for conformal Killing vectors and hidden symmetries encoded in Killing-Yano tensors.