Deformations of extremal black holes and the UV
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Chen, Calvin Y-R
de Rham, Claudia
Tolley, Andrew J
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
It has recently been noted that deformations of extremal anti–de Sitter (AdS) black holes in four and higher dimensions are generically nonsmooth or singular on the horizon. Further, it was found that certain deformations of asymptotically flat extremal black holes are marginal, causing the nature of the horizon to be strongly sensitive to UV corrections—in particular, Wilson coefficients associated with consistent UV completions generically lead to worse behavior on the horizon. In this work, we extend the discussion of deformed horizons in the presence of UV corrections to extremal charged black holes in AdS, where we find a tower of marginal perturbations for different black hole masses. We argue that the apparent UV sensitivity of marginal modes is, in fact, a feature of the UV theory, which is correctly reproduced by the effective field theory (EFT), and illustrate this with explicit UV completions confirming the validity of the EFT. We demonstrate that the same holds for a scalar-Maxwell EFT with known UV completion. In the gravitational case, the sign of EFT corrections to marginal perturbations is generally connected with the signs implied by positivity bounds, with UV completions generically leading to worse behavior on the horizon. We conjecture that this result is more generic and use this to derive more general positivity bounds motivated by the weak gravity conjecture, which we illustrate with further evidence.
Date Issued
2025-01-15
Date Acceptance
2024-12-26
Citation
Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 2025, 111 (2)
ISSN
1550-7998
Publisher
American Physical Society
Journal / Book Title
Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume
111
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
License URL
Identifier
10.1103/PhysRevD.111.024056
Subjects
Astronomy & Astrophysics
EFFECTIVE-FIELD THEORY
PERTURBATIONS
Physical Sciences
Physics
Physics, Particles & Fields
Science & Technology
SMOOTHNESS
SPACETIME
TERMS
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
024056
Date Publish Online
2025-01-23