The enhançon and the consistency of excision

The enhançon mechanism removes a family of timelike singularities from certain supergravity spacetimes by forming a shell of branes on which the exterior geometry terminates. The problematic interior geometry is replaced by a new spacetime, which in the prototype extremal case is simply flat. We show that this excision process, made inevitable by stringy phenomena such as enhanced gauge symmetry and the vanishing of certain D-branes' tension at the shell, is also consistent at the purely gravitational level. The source introduced at the excision surface between the interior and exterior geometries behaves exactly as a shell of wrapped D6 branes, and in particular, the tension vanishes at precisely the enhançon radius. These observations can be generalized, and we present the case for nonextremal generalizations of the geometry, showing that the procedure allows for the possibility that the interior geometry contains a horizon. Further knowledge of the dynamics of the enhançon shell itself is needed to determine the precise position of the horizon, and to uncover a complete physical interpretation of the solutions.