A local characterisation for static charged black holes

Abstract: We obtain a purely local characterisation that singles out the Majumdar-Papapetrou class, the near-horizon Bertotti-Robinson geometry and the Reissner-Nordstr\"om exterior solution, together with its plane and hyperbolic counterparts, among the static electrovacuum spacetimes. These five classes are found to form the whole set of static Einstein-Maxwell fields without sources and conformally flat space of orbits, this is, the conformastat electrovacuum spacetimes. The main part of the proof consists in showing that a functional relationship between the gravitational and electromagnetic potentials must always exist. The classification procedure provides also an improved characterisation of Majumdar-Papapetrou, by only requiring a conformally flat space of orbits with a vanishing Ricci scalar of the usual conveniently rescaled 3-metric. A simple global consideration allows us to state that the asymptotically flat subset of the Majumdar-Papapetrou class and the Reissner-Nordstr\"om exterior solution are the only asymptotically flat conformastat electrovacuum spacetimes.