BLACK HOLES AND ATTRACTORS IN SUPERGRAVITY

We discuss some of the basic features of extremal black holes in four-dimensional extended supergravities. Firstly, all regular solutions display an attractor behavior for the scalar field evolution towards the black hole horizon. Secondly, they can be obtained by solving first order ow equations even when they are not supersymmetric, provided one identifies a suitable superpotential W which also gives the black hole entropy at the horizon and its ADM mass at spatial infinity. We focus on N=8 supergravity and we review the basic role played by U-duality of the underlying supergravity in determining the attractors, their entropies, their masses and in classifying both regular and singular extremal black holes.