Generalized Couch-Torrence symmetry for rotating extremal black holes in maximal supergravity

Abstract

The extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole admits a conformal inversion symmetry, in which the metric is mapped into itself under an inversion of the radial coordinate combined with a conformal rescaling. In the rotating generalization, Couch and Torrence showed that the Kerr-Newman metric no longer exhibits a conformal inversion symmetry, but the radial equation arising in the separation of the massless Klein-Gordon equation admits a mode-dependent inversion symmetry, where the radius of inversion depends upon the energy and azimuthal angular momentum of the mode. It was more recently shown that the static four-charge extremal black holes of STU supergravity (i.e., $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity in four dimension coupled to three vector multiplets) admit a generalization of the conformal inversion symmetry, in which the conformally inverted metric is a member of the same four-charge black hole family but with transformed charges. In this paper we study further generalizations of these inversion symmetries, within the general class of extremal STU supergravity black holes. For the rotating black holes, where again the massless Klein-Gordon equation is separable, we show that examples with four electric charges exhibit a generalization of the Couch-Torrence symmetry of the radial equation. Now, as in the conformal inversion of the static specializations, the inversion of the radial equation maps it to the radial equation for a rotating black hole with transformed electric charges. We also study the inversion transformations for the general case of extremal Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield STU black holes carrying eight charges (four electric plus four magnetic), and argue that analogous generalizations of the inversion symmetries exist for both the static and the rotating cases.