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Supersymmetry of the C-metric and the general Plebanski-Demianski solution

We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the general Plebanski-Demianski (PD) solution of Einstein-Maxwell theory with a negative cosmological constant admits Killing spinors. We consider in detail two different scaling limits of the PD metric. The first of these limits removes the acceleration parameter, and leads to the Carter-Plebanski solution. In this case, the integrability conditions for Killing spinors were obtained by Alonso-Alberca, Meessen and Ortin in hep-th/0003071, and we show that these are not only necessary, but also sufficient for the existence of Killing spinors. This fills also a gap in hep-th/9808097, where the integrability conditions for supersymmetry of the Kerr-Newman-AdS black hole were worked out, but the Killing spinor was not constructed explicitely. The second scaling limit eliminates the rotation parameter, and leads to the cosmological C-metric, which describes accelerated black holes in AdS. Also in this case, the supersymmetry conditions are obtained, and it is shown that they follow from the ones of the general PD solution by scaling the parameters appropriately. In all cases, we determine the three-dimensional base space that appears in the classification scheme of hep-th/0307022, and prove that for the 1/2-supersymmetric Reissner-Nordstrom-AdS spacetime, this base is unique. A Wick-rotation of our results leads to gravitational instantons that generalize the ones constructed recently by Martelli, Passias and Sparks in arXiv:12124618 to U(1)xU(1) symmetry. These instantons are shown to admit an integrable almost complex structure. Finally, our work may open the possibility to systematically construct generalizations of the PD metric that include scalar fields with a potential in matter-coupled gauged supergravity.