Zooming in on the horizon when in its Meissner state

Abstract

When approaching extremality, rotating black holes tend to expel the magnetic field in which they are immersed. This phenomenon, being reminiscent of the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect in superconductors, is known as the black hole Meissner effect, and here we study it in the backreacting regime and from the near horizon perspective. By resorting to methods recently developed in the literature, which allow to compute conserved charges in the near horizon region, regardless the details of the asymptotia at large distance, we investigate the properties of the black hole horizon when in its Meissner state. We show that, when in such state, the horizon exhibits two sets of supertranslation symmetries as well as a symmetry generated by the local conformal group. The supertranslations are generated by two infinite sets of currents, one of which comes from local dilations of the advanced null coordinate at the horizon, and the other from local gauge transformations that preserve the electromagnetic field configuration at the horizon. We show that the evaluation of the conserved charges associated to these symmetries correctly reproduce the physical charges of the magnetized black holes and their thermodynamics. This represents a concrete application of the techniques developed in [1–3] and it extends the results of [4] to arbitrary values of the black hole charges. In addition, we elaborate on the charges computation at the horizon: we show the equivalence between the horizon charges and the evaluation of the corresponding Komar integrals. Besides, we show the validity of the Gauss phenomenon by explicitly relating near horizon charges with fluxes and charges computed by other techniques. All this provides a method to derive the thermodynamics of magnetized horizons in a quite succinct way, including the case of horizons exhibiting the Meissner effect.