Bulk charges in eleven dimensions

Abstract

Eleven dimensional supergravity has electric type currents arising from the Chern-Simon and anomaly terms in the action. However the bulk charge integrates to zero for asymptotically flat solutions with topological trivial spatial sections. We show that by relaxing the boundary conditions to generalisations of the ALE and ALF boundary conditions in four dimensions one can obtain static solutions with a bulk charge preserving between 1/16 and 1/4 of the supersymmetries. One can introduce membranes with the same sign of charge into these backgrounds. This raises the possibility that these generalized membranes might decay quantum mechanically to leave just a bulk distribution of charge. Alternatively and more probably, a bulk distribution of charge can decay into a collection of singlely charged membranes. Dimensional reductions of these solutions lead to novel representations of extreme black holes in four dimensions with up to four charges. We discuss how the eleven-dimensional Kaluza-Klein monopole wrapped around a space with non-zero first Pontryagin class picks up an electric charge proportional to the Pontryagin number.