Introduction

The goal of the present chapter is to introduce black holes and branes in supergravity in the simplest possible manner. As a result, we make no attempt to be complete and, in fact, we will intentionally omit many points dear to the hearts of practising string theorists and supergravity experts. In particular, spinors and supersymmetry will make only a passing appearance, in section 11.2.3, which can be skipped if the material seems too technical (though be sure to read the “executive summary” at the end of that section). Instead, we focus on bosonic spacetime solutions and the dynamics of the associated bosonic fields.

Even within this limited scope, our referencing of the original works will be rather sporadic. The interested reader can consult [1] for a more encyclopedic review of branes and black holes in string theory (as of 1997), with numerous references to the original works. We also refer the reader to [2] for a more recent review of black holes in four- and five-dimensional supergravity and for complimentary material in ten and eleven dimensions, to [3] for a partial guide to the literature as of 2004, and to various textbooks [4–9] for further reading.

Our treatment will focus on supergravity theories in ten and eleven dimensions, which are in many ways simpler than their lower-dimensional counterparts and which allow us to make direct contact with string theory.