The first law of heterotic stringy black hole mechanics at zeroth order in α′

Abstract

Abstract We prove the first law of black hole mechanics in the context of the Heterotic Superstring effective action compactified on a torus to leading order in α′, using Wald’s formalism, covariant Lie derivatives and momentum maps. The Kalb-Ramond field strength of this theory has Abelian Chern-Simons terms which induce Nicolai-Townsend transformations of the Kalb-Ramond field. We show how to deal with all these gauge symmetries deriving the first law in terms of manifestly gauge-invariant quantities. In presence of Chern-Simons terms, several definitions of the conserved charges exist, but the formalism picks up only one of them to play a role in the first law. We study explicitly a non-extremal, charged, black ring solution of pure $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 1, d = 5 supergravity embedded in the Heterotic Superstring effective field theory.This work is a first step towards the derivation of the first law at first order in α′ where, more complicated, non-Abelian, Lorentz (“gravitational”) and Yang-Mills Chern-Simons terms are included in the Kalb-Ramond field strength. The derivation of a first law is a necessary step towards the derivation of a manifestly gauge-invariant entropy formula which is still lacking in the literature. In its turn, this entropy formula is needed to compare unambiguously macroscopic and microscopic black hole entropies.