How much can supergravity teach us about microscopic features of BPS black holes?

Abstract

We review recent results in the study of regular four dimensional BPS black holes in toroidally compactified type II (or M) theory. We discuss the generating solution for this kind of black holes, its microscopic description(s), and compute the corresponding microscopic entropy. These achievements, which provide a description of the fundamental degrees of freedom accounting for the entropy of any regular BPS black hole in the theory under consideration, are inscribed within a research project aimed to the study of the microscopic properties of this kind of solutions in relation to U--duality invariants computed on the corresponding macroscopic (supergravity) description.

17 pages, latex. To appear in the proceedings of the IX Marcel Grossman Meeting (Rome, July 2000), the TMR conference "Integrability Nonperturbative Effects And Symmetry In Quantum Field Theory" (Paris, September 2000) and the RTN conference ``The Quantum Structure of Spacetime and the Geometric Nature of Fundamental Interactions'' (Berlin, October 2000)