Landau degeneracy and black hole entropy Original Research Article

We consider the supergravity solution describing a configuration of intersecting D4-branes with non-vanishing world-volume gauge fields. The entropy of such a black hole is calculated in terms of the D-branes quantised charges. The non-extreme solution is also considered and the corresponding thermodynamical quantities are calculated in terms of a D-brane/anti-D-brane system. To perform the quantum mechanical D-brane analysis we study open strings with their ends on branes with a magnetic condensate. Applying the results to our D-brane system we manage to have a perfect agreement between the D-brane entropy counting and the corresponding semi-classical result. The Landau degeneracy of the open string states describing the excitations of the D-brane system enters in a crucial way. We also derive the near-extreme results which agree with the semi-classical calculations.