Abstract

We investigate the hypersymmetry bounds on the higher spin black hole parameters that follow from the asymptotic symmetry superalgebra in higher-spin anti-de Sitter gravity in three spacetime dimensions. We consider anti-de Sitter hypergravity for which the analysis is most transparent. This is a osp(1 vertical bar 4) circle plus osp(1 vertical bar 4) Chern-Simons theory which contains, besides a spin-2 field, a spin-4 field and a spin-5/2 field. The asymptotic symmetry superalgebra is then the direct sum of two-copies of the hypersymmetric extension W-(2,W- (5/2,4)) of W-(2,W-4), which contains fermionic generators of conformal weight 5/2 and bosonic generators of conformal weight 4 in addition to the Virasoro generators. Following standard methods, we derive bounds on the conserved charges from the anticommutator of the hypersymmetry generators. The hypersymmetry bounds are nonlinear and are saturated by the hypersymmetric black holes, which turn out to possess 1/4-hypersymmetry and to be "extreme", where extremality can be defined in terms of the entropy: extreme black holes are those that fulfill the extremality bounds beyond which the entropy ceases to be a real function of the black hole parameters. We also extend the analysis to other sp(4)-solitonic solutions which are maximally (hyper) symmetric.