Kerr Black Holes Are Not Fragile

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that near-extremal AdS-Kerr black holes, despite their severe deformation, are stable against brane pair production, indicating they are not fragile in string theory.

Contribution

It proves that highly deformed, rapidly rotating AdS-Kerr black holes are stable against non-perturbative stringy instabilities, challenging previous concerns about their fragility.

Findings

Brane pair production is suppressed around AdS-Kerr black holes.

Near-extremal angular momentum does not lead to instability.

Rapidly rotating black holes are stable in string-theoretic models.

Abstract

Certain AdS black holes are "fragile", in the sense that, if they are deformed excessively, they become unstable to a fundamental non-perturbative stringy effect analogous to Schwinger pair-production [of branes]. Near-extremal topologically spherical AdS-Kerr black holes, which are natural candidates for string-theoretic models of the very rapidly rotating black holes that have actually been observed to exist, do represent a very drastic deformation of the AdS-Schwarzschild geometry. One therefore has strong reason to fear that these objects might be "fragile", which in turn could mean that asymptotically flat rapidly rotating black holes might be fragile in string theory. Here we show that this does not happen: despite the severe deformation implied by near-extremal angular momenta, brane pair production around topologically spherical AdS-Kerr black holes is always suppressed.