Minimal redefinition of the OSV ensemble

Abstract

In the interesting conjecture, Z_{BH} = |Z_{top}|^2, proposed by Ooguri, Strominger and Vafa (OSV), the black hole ensemble is a mixed ensemble and the resulting degeneracy of states, as obtained from the ensemble inverse-Laplace integration, suffers from prefactors which do not respect the electric-magnetic duality. One idea to overcome this deficiency, as claimed recently, is imposing nontrivial measures for the ensemble sum. We address this problem and upon a redefinition of the OSV ensemble whose variables are as numerous as the electric potentials, show that for restoring the symmetry no non-Euclidean measure is needful. In detail, we rewrite the OSV free energy as a function of new variables which are combinations of the electric-potentials and the black hole charges. Subsequently the Legendre transformation which bridges between the entropy and the black hole free energy in terms of these variables, points to a generalized ensemble. In this context, we will consider all the cases of relevance: small and large black holes, with or without D_6-brane charge. For the case of vanishing D_6-brane charge, the new ensemble is pure canonical and the electric-magnetic duality is restored exactly, leading to proper results for the black hole degeneracy of states. For more general cases, the construction still works well as far as the violation of the duality by the corresponding OSV result is restricted to a prefactor. In a concrete example we shall show that for black holes with non-vanishing D_6-brane charge, there are cases where the duality violation goes beyond this restriction, thus imposing non-trivial measures is incapable of restoring the duality. This observation signals for a deeper modification in the OSV proposal.