p-Brane Black Holes as Stability Islands

Abstract

In multidimensional gravity with an arbitrary number of internal Ricci-flat factor spaces, interacting with electric and magnetic $p$-branes, spherically symmetric configurations are considered. It is shown that all single-brane black-hole solutions are stable under spherically symmetric perturbations, whereas similar solutions possessing naked singularities turn out to be catastrophically unstable. The black hole stability conclusion is extended to some classes of configurations with intersecting branes. These results do not depend on the particular composition of the $D$-dimensional space-time, on the number of dilatonic scalar fields $\phi^a$ and on the values of their coupling constants. Some examples from 11-dimensional supergravity are considered.