Planar Black Holes as a Route to Understanding the Weak Gravity Conjecture

TL;DR

This paper explores how planar black holes can shed light on the Weak Gravity Conjecture by demonstrating their bifurcation processes are compatible with thermodynamics and revealing their inherent instabilities near extremality.

Contribution

It shows that planar black holes can undergo bifurcations consistent with the second law, providing a new perspective on the Weak Gravity Conjecture and black hole stability.

Findings

Planar black holes can bifurcate without violating thermodynamics.

Bifurcations in planar black holes are linked to naked singularities.

Sufficiently near extremality, planar black holes become unstable to brane emission.

Abstract

One version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture requires that it should be possible for an extremal black hole to emit a smaller black hole: that is, the original black hole bifurcates. For asymptotically flat and asymptotically AdS Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes with spherical event horizons, such a bifurcation reduces the total classical entropy of the system, and so it is apparently forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics. It may well be possible to remedy this by taking other (for example, quantum-gravitational) effects into account, but it is difficult to understand this in a quantitative way. In the case of asymptotically AdS Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes with \emph{planar} event horizons, however, one can show that bifurcations are definitely compatible with the second law. (Naked singularities, generated by the bifurcation, may play an important role here.) Furthermore, in this case one can exhibit a detailed mechanism explaining precisely why planar black holes must indeed be unstable (through emission of branes) when they are sufficiently close to extremality. Thus planar black holes can improve our understanding of the WGC.