Proof of the weak gravity conjecture from black hole entropy

By C. Cheung, Junyu Liu, Grant N. Remmen. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2018

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractWe prove that higher-dimension operators contribute positively to the entropy of a thermodynamically stable black hole at fixed mass and charge. Our results apply whenever the dominant corrections originate at tree level from quantum field theoretic dynamics. More generally, positivity of the entropy shift is equivalent to a certain inequality relating the free energies of black holes. These entropy inequalities mandate new positivity bounds on the coefficients of higher-dimension operators. One of these conditions implies that the charge-to-mass ratio of an extremal black hole asymptotes to unity from above for increasing mass. Consequently, large extremal black holes are unstable to decay to smaller extremal black holes and the weak gravity conjecture is automatically satisfied. Our findings generalize to arbitrary spacetime dimension and to the case of multiple gauge fields. The assumptions of this proof are valid across a range of scenarios, including string theory constructions with a dilaton stabilized below the string scale.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/168fbe408ac27ef88812b1d93788ae3a213a3e4a

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Citations in the corpus

A Tower Weak Gravity Conjecture from Infrared Consistency (2018, background): “d anymore by proposing a nite number of particles with bounded charge-to-mass ratios. In order that both ordinary and Kaluza-Klein photons travel subluminally, the theories instead 2 Subsequent works [50,51] using arguments along the lines of [26] have appeared. However, despite what their titles su”
A stringy test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture (2018, background): “General arguments aiming to prove the Weak Gravity Conjecture involve the entropy of black holes [14,47,48], consistency of the effective field theory [9,49] or the AdS/CFT correspondence [50–53].”
The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “e deep ultraviolet, which then leads to strong positivity constraints on higher derivative operators [52]. This approach was further developed in [53{55], and a general proof was claimed in [56].9 In [58,59] a slightly dierent approach based on general expectations that the entropy of a system shoul”