Black Holes and Membranes in Higher Dimensional Theories with Dilaton Fields

Abstract We consider scale invariant theories which couple gravity to Maxwell fields and antisymmetric tensor fields with a dilaton field. We exhibit in a unified way solutions representing black hole, space-time membrane, vortex and cosmological solutions. Their physical properties depend sensitively on the coupling constant of the dilaton field, there being critical value separating qualitatively different types of behaviour, e.g. the temperature of a charged black hole in the extreme limit. It is also shown that compactification into the 4-dimensional Minkowski space in terms of a membrane solution is possible in 10-dimensional supergravity model.