Three-dimensional black holes and descendants

Abstract

We determine the most general three-dimensional vacuum spacetime with a negative cosmological constant containing a non-singular Killing horizon. We show that the general solution with a spatially compact horizon possesses a second commuting Killing field and deduce that it must be related to the BTZ black hole (or its near-horizon geometry) by a diffeomorphism. We show there is a general class of asymptotically AdS$_3$ extreme black holes with arbitrary charges with respect to one of the asymptotic-symmetry Virasoro algebras and vanishing charges with respect to the other. We interpret these as descendants of the extreme BTZ black hole.