Festina Lente: EFT Constraints from Charged Black Hole Evaporation in de Sitter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how charged black holes in de Sitter space evaporate via Hawking radiation and Schwinger pair production, deriving bounds on particle masses and discussing implications for the Weak Gravity Conjecture and cosmology.

Contribution

It establishes a lower bound on charged particle masses ensuring black hole evaporation aligns with de Sitter thermodynamics, connecting EFT constraints with the Weak Gravity Conjecture.

Findings

Charged black holes must evaporate to de Sitter space without remnants.

The Standard Model's charged spectrum satisfies the derived bounds.

Heuristic arguments support a de Sitter version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture.

Abstract

In the Swampland philosophy of constraining EFTs from black hole mechanics we study charged black hole evaporation in de Sitter space. We establish how the black hole mass and charge change over time due to both Hawking radiation and Schwinger pair production as a function of the masses and charges of the elementary particles in the theory. We find a lower bound on the mass of charged particles by demanding that large charged black holes evaporate back to empty de Sitter space, in accordance with the thermal picture of the de Sitter static patch. This bound is satisfied by the charged spectrum of the Standard Model. We discuss phenomenological implications for the cosmological hierarchy problem and inflation. Enforcing the thermal picture also leads to a heuristic remnant argument for the Weak Gravity Conjecture in de Sitter space, where the usual kinematic arguments do not work. We also comment on a possible relation between WGC and universal bounds on equilibration times. All in all, charged black holes in de Sitter should make haste to evaporate, but they should not rush it.