Paper detail

On the symmetry orbits of black holes in non-linear sigma models

Breitenlohner, Maison and Gibbons claimed some time ago that all bona-fide four dimensional asymptotically flat non-degenerate black holes are in a symmetry orbit of the Schwarzschild/Kerr black hole in a large set of theories of gravity and matter. Their argument involved reducing the theory on a time-like Killing vector field and analysing the resulting three dimensional sigma model of maps to a symmetric space $G/H$. In the construction of their proof, they conjectured the existence of a suitable $H$-transformation that always remove the electromagnetic charges of the four dimensional black hole solution. We show in this short note that such a transformation does not exist in general, and discuss a set of boundary conditions on the horizon for the scalar fields in the sigma model that yield black holes for which the result by Breitenlohner, Maison and Gibbons can be applied.