Extremality Versus Supersymmetry in Stringy Black Holes

Abstract

We study general black-hole solutions of the low-energy string effective action in arbitrary dimensions using a general metric that can describe them all in a unified way both in the extreme and non-extreme cases. We calculate the mass, temperature and entropy and study which relations amongst the charges and the mass lead to extremality. We find that the temperature always vanishes in the extreme limit and we find that, for a set of n charges (no further reducible by duality) there are 2^{(n-1)} combinations of the charges that imply extremality. Not all of these combinations can be central charge eigenvalues and, thus, there are in general extreme black holes which are not supersymmetric (or ``BPS-saturated''). In the N=8 supergravity case we argue that the existence of roughly as many supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric extreme black holes suggests the existence of an underlying twelve-dimensional structure.