Non-supersymmetric black holes with α′ corrections

Abstract

We study extremal 5- and 4-dimensional black hole solutions of the Heterotic Superstring effective action at first order in α′ with, respectively, 3 and 4 charges of arbitrary signs. For a particular choice of the relative signs of these charges the solutions are supersymmetric, but other signs give rise to non-supersymmetric extremal black holes. Although at zeroth order all these solutions are formally identical, we show that the α′ corrections are drastically different depending on how we break supersymmetry. We provide fully analytic mathcal{O} (α′) solutions and we compute their charges, masses and entropies and check that they are invariant under α′-corrected T-duality transformations. The masses of some of these black holes are corrected in a complicated way, but we show that the shift is always negative, in agreement with the Weak Gravity Conjecture. Our formula for the corrected entropy of the four-dimensional black holes generalizes previous results obtained from the entropy function method, as we consider a more general way in which supersymmetry can be broken.