Conformal mechanics on rotating Bertotti-Robinson spacetime

We investigate conformal mechanics associated with the rotating Bertotti-Robinson (RBR) geometry found recently as the near-horizon limit of the extremal rotating Einstein-Maxwell dilaton-axion black holes. The solution breaks the SL(2, R) x SO(3) symmetry of Bertotti-Robinson (BR) spacetime to SL(2, R) x U(1) and breaks supersymmetry in the sence of N = 4, d = 4 supergravity as well. However, it shares with BR such properties as confinement of timelike geodesics and discreteness of the energy of test fields on the geodesically complete manifold. Conformal mechanics governing the radial geodesic motion coincides with that for a charged particle in the BR background (a relativistic version of the de Alfaro-Fubini-Furlan model), with the azimuthal momentum playing the role of a charge. Similarly to the BR case, the transition from Poincare to global coordinates leads to a redefinition of the Hamiltonian making the energy spectrum discrete. Although the metric does not split into a product space even asymptotically, it still admits an infinite-dimensional extension of SL(2, R) as asymptotic symmetry. The latter is shown to be given by the product of one copy of the Virasoro algebra and U(1), the same being valid for the extremal Kerr throat. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.