Monday, November 21, 2016

Extremal black holes via Killing spinors

The usual way to obtain the metric and electromagnetic field of a charged black hole in general relativity is to make a spherically symmetric ansatz, insert this ansatz into the Einstein-Maxwell equations and then solve the resulting set of non-linear ordinary differential equations. In this post I explain an alternative method that uses Killing spinors. This method can be used for extremal black holes. These are black holes with charge equal to the mass.