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1. Repulsive black holes and higher-derivatives

   https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2022)013  

   Cremonini, Sera ; Jones, Callum R. ; Liu, James T. ; McPeak, Brian ; Tang, Yuezhang ( March 2022 , Journal of High Energy Physics)

   A bstract In two-derivative theories of gravity coupled to matter, charged black holes are self-attractive at large distances, with the force vanishing at zero temperature. However, in the presence of massless scalar fields and four-derivative corrections, zero-temperature black holes no longer need to obey the no-force condition. In this paper, we show how to calculate the long-range force between such black holes. We develop an efficient method for computing the higher-derivative corrections to the scalar charges when the theory has a shift symmetry, and compute the resulting force in a variety of examples. We find that higher-derivative corrected black holes may be self-attractive or self-repulsive, depending on the value of the Wilson coefficients and the VEVs of scalar moduli. Indeed, we find black hole solutions which are both superextremal and self-attractive. Furthermore, we present examples where no choice of higher-derivative coefficients allows for self-repulsive black hole states in all directions in charge space. This suggests that, unlike the Weak Gravity Conjecture, which may be satisfied by the black hole spectrum alone, the Repulsive Force Conjecture requires additional constraints on the spectrum of charged particles. 

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2. Sudden breakdown of effective field theory near cool Kerr-Newman black holes

   https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)122  

   Horowitz, Gary T ; Kolanowski, Maciej ; Remmen, Grant N ; Santos, Jorge E ( May 2024 , Journal of High Energy Physics)

   It was recently shown that (near-)extremal Kerr black holes are sensitive probes of small higher-derivative corrections to general relativity. In particular, these corrections produce diverging tidal forces on the horizon in the extremal limit. We show that adding a black hole charge makes this effect qualitatively stronger. Higher-derivative corrections to the Kerr-Newman solution produce tidal forces that scale inversely in the black hole temperature. We find that, unlike the Kerr case, for realistic values of the black hole charge large tidal forces can arise before quantum corrections due to the Schwarzian mode become important, so that the near-horizon behavior of the black hole is dictated by higher-derivative terms in the effective theory.

    

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3. Black holes, moduli, and long-range forces

   https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2020)029  

   Heidenreich, Ben ( November 2020 , Journal of High Energy Physics)

   null (Ed.)

   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. 

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4. The statistical mechanics of near-BPS black holes

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8121/ac3be9  

   Heydeman, Matthew ; Iliesiu, Luca V ; Turiaci, Gustavo J ; Zhao, Wenli ( December 2021 , Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical)

   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. 

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5. Dark dimension, the swampland, and the dark matter fraction composed of primordial near-extremal black holes

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.095008  

   Anchordoqui, Luis A ; Antoniadis, Ignatios ; Lüst, Dieter ( May 2024 , Physical Review D)

   In a recent publication we studied the decay rate of primordial black holes perceiving the dark dimension, an innovative five-dimensional (5D) scenario that has a compact space with characteristic length scale in the micron range. We demonstrated that the rate of Hawking radiation of 5D black holes slows down compared to 4D black holes of the same mass. Armed with our findings we showed that for a species scale of$\mathcal{O}({10}^{10}\mathrm{GeV})$, an all-dark-matter interpretation in terms of primordial black holes should be feasible for black hole masses in the range${10}^{14}\lesssim M/\mathrm{g}\lesssim {10}^{21}$. As a natural outgrowth of our recent study, herein we calculate the Hawking evaporation of near-extremal 5D black holes. Using generic entropy arguments we demonstrate that Hawking evaporation of higher-dimensional near-extremal black holes proceeds at a slower rate than the corresponding Schwarzschild black holes of the same mass. Assisted by this result we show that if there were 5D primordial near-extremal black holes in nature, then a primordial black hole all-dark-matter interpretation would be possible in the mass range${10}^5\sqrt{\beta }\lesssim M/\mathrm{g}\lesssim {10}^{21}$, where$\beta$is a parameter that controls the difference between mass and charge of the associated near-extremal black hole.