skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Black holes, moduli, and long-range forces
A bstract It is well known that an identical pair of extremal Reissner-Nordström black holes placed a large distance apart will exert no force on each other. In this paper, I establish that the same result holds in a very large class of two-derivative effective theories containing an arbitrary number of gauge fields and moduli, where the appropriate analog of an extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole is a charged, spherically symmetric black hole with vanishing surface gravity or vanishing horizon area. Analogous results hold for black branes.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1914934
PAR ID:
10288472
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of High Energy Physics
Volume:
2020
Issue:
11
ISSN:
1029-8479
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. A bstract Perturbations of massless fields in the Kerr-Newman black hole background enjoy a (“Love”) SL(2 , ℝ) symmetry in the suitably defined near zone approximation. We present a detailed study of this symmetry and show how the intricate behavior of black hole responses in four and higher dimensions can be understood from the SL(2 , ℝ) representation theory. In particular, static perturbations of four-dimensional black holes belong to highest weight SL(2 , ℝ) representations. It is this highest weight properety that forces the static Love numbers to vanish. We find that the Love symmetry is tightly connected to the enhanced isometries of extremal black holes. This relation is simplest for extremal charged spherically symmetric (Reissner-Nordström) solutions, where the Love symmetry exactly reduces to the isometry of the near horizon AdS 2 throat. For rotating (Kerr-Newman) black holes one is lead to consider an infinite-dimensional SL(2 , ℝ) ⋉ $$ \hat{\textrm{U}}{(1)}_{\mathcal{V}} $$ U ̂ 1 V extension of the Love symmetry. It contains three physically distinct subalgebras: the Love algebra, the Starobinsky near zone algebra, and the near horizon algebra that becomes the Bardeen-Horowitz isometry in the extremal limit. We also discuss other aspects of the Love symmetry, such as the geometric meaning of its generators for spin weighted fields, connection to the no-hair theorems, non-renormalization of Love numbers, its relation to (non-extremal) Kerr/CFT correspondence and prospects of its existence in modified theories of gravity. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    A bstract The gravitational dual to the grand canonical ensemble of a large N holographic theory is a charged black hole. These spacetimes — for example Reissner- Nordström-AdS — can have Cauchy horizons that render the classical gravitational dynamics of the black hole interior incomplete. We show that a (spatially uniform) deformation of the CFT by a neutral scalar operator generically leads to a black hole with no inner horizon. There is instead a spacelike Kasner singularity in the interior. For relevant deformations, Cauchy horizons never form. For certain irrelevant deformations, Cauchy horizons can exist at one specific temperature. We show that the scalar field triggers a rapid collapse of the Einstein-Rosen bridge at the would-be Cauchy horizon. Finally, we make some observations on the interior of charged dilatonic black holes where the Kasner exponent at the singularity exhibits an attractor mechanism in the low temperature limit. 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract In classical general relativity, the values of fields on spacetime are uniquely determined by their values at an initial time within the domain of dependence of this initial data surface. However, it may occur that the spacetime under consideration extends beyond this domain of dependence, and fields, therefore, are not entirely determined by their initial data. This occurs, for example, in the well-known (maximally) extended Reissner–Nordström or Reissner–Nordström–deSitter (RNdS) spacetimes. The boundary of the region determined by the initial data is called the ‘Cauchy horizon.’ It is located inside the black hole in these spacetimes. The strong cosmic censorship conjecture asserts that the Cauchy horizon does not, in fact, exist in practice because the slightest perturbation (of the metric itself or the matter fields) will become singular there in a sufficiently catastrophic way that solutions cannot be extended beyond the Cauchy horizon. Thus, if strong cosmic censorship holds, the Cauchy horizon will be converted into a ‘final singularity,’ and determinism will hold. Recently, however, it has been found that, classically this is not the case in RNdS spacetimes in a certain range of mass, charge, and cosmological constant. In this paper, we consider a quantum scalar field in RNdS spacetime and show that quantum theory comes to the rescue of strong cosmic censorship. We find that for any state that is nonsingular (i.e., Hadamard) within the domain of dependence, the expected stress-tensor blows up with affine parameter,V, along a radial null geodesic transverse to the Cauchy horizon asTVV∼C/V2withCindependent of the state andC≠ 0 generically in RNdS spacetimes. This divergence is stronger than in the classical theory and should be sufficient to convert the Cauchy horizon into a singularity through which the spacetime cannot be extended as a (weak) solution of the semiclassical Einstein equation. This behavior is expected to be quite general, although it is possible to haveC= 0 in certain special cases, such as the BTZ black hole. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Due to the failure of thermodynamics for low temperature near-extremal black holes, it has long been conjectured that a ‘thermodynamic mass gap’ exists between an extremal black hole and the lightest near-extremal state. For non-supersymmetric near-extremal black holes in Einstein gravity with an AdS 2 throat, no such gap was found. Rather, at that energy scale, the spectrum exhibits a continuum of states, up to non-perturbative corrections. In this paper, we compute the partition function of near-BPS black holes in supergravity where the emergent, broken, symmetry is PSU (1, 1|2). To reliably compute this partition function, we show that the gravitational path integral can be reduced to that of a N = 4 supersymmetric extension of the Schwarzian theory, which we define and exactly quantize. In contrast to the non-supersymmetric case, we find that black holes in supergravity have a mass gap and a large extremal black hole degeneracy consistent with the Bekenstein–Hawking area. Our results verify a plethora of string theory conjectures, concerning the scale of the mass gap and the counting of extremal micro-states. 
    more » « less
  5. A<sc>bstract</sc> Effective field theories are constrained by the requirement that their constituents never move superluminally on non-trivial backgrounds. In this paper, we study time delays experienced by photons propagating on charged shockwave backgrounds in five dimensions. In the absence of gravity — where the shockwaves are electric fields sourced by boosted charges — we derive positivity bounds for the four-derivative corrections to electromagnetism, reproducing previous results derived from scattering amplitudes. By considering the gravitational shockwaves sourced by Reissner-Nordström black holes, we derive new constraints in the presence of gravity. We observe the by-now familiar weakening of positivity bounds in the presence of gravity, but without the logarithmic divergences present in 4d. We find that the strongest bounds appear by examining the time delay near the horizon of the smallest possible black hole, and discuss on the validity of the EFT expansion in this region. We comment on our bounds in the context of the swampland program as well as their relation with the positivity bounds obtained from dispersion relations. 
    more » « less