Implications of the weak gravity conjecture for tidal Love numbers of black holes

Journal Article · 27 August 2023 · Physical Review. D.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.044066 · OSTI ID:1997031

De Luca, Valerio  ^[1]; Khoury, Justin ^[1]; Wong, Sam S. C.  ^[1]

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1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)

The weak gravity conjecture indicates that extremal black holes in the low-energy effective field theory should be able to decay. This criterion gives rise to nontrivial constraints on the coefficients of higher-order derivative corrections to gravity. In this paper, we investigate the tidal deformability of neutral black holes due to higher-order derivative corrections. As a proof of concept, we consider a correction of cubic order in the Riemann curvature tensor. The tidal Love numbers of neutral black holes receive leading-order corrections from higher-order derivative terms, since black holes in pure General Relativity have vanishing tidal Love number. We conclude that the interplay between the tidal deformability of black holes and the weak gravity conjecture provides useful information about the effective field theory.

• Research Organization: Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States); University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0013528
• OSTI ID: 1997031
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D., Journal Name: Physical Review. D. Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 108; ISSN 2470-0010; ISSN 2470-0029
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English