The statistical mechanics of near-BPS black holes

Due to the failure of thermodynamics for low temperature near-extremal black holes, it has long been conjectured that a "thermodynamic mass gap'' exists between an extremal black hole and the lightest near-extremal state. For non-supersymmetric near-extremal black holes in Einstein gravity with an AdS2 throat, no such gap was found. Rather, at that energy scale, the spectrum exhibits a continuum of states, up to non-perturbative corrections. In this paper, we compute the partition function of near-BPS black holes in supergravity where the emergent, broken, symmetry is PSU(1,1|2). To reliably compute this partition function, we show that the gravitational path integral can be reduced to that of a N=4 supersymmetric extension of the Schwarzian theory, which we define and exactly quantize. In contrast to the non-supersymmetric case, we find that black holes in supergravity have a mass gap and a large extremal black hole degeneracy consistent with the Bekenstein-Hawking area. Our results verify a plethora of string theory conjectures, concerning the scale of the mass gap and the counting of extremal micro-states.

Revisiting the scalar weak gravity conjecture

We revisit the scalar weak gravity conjecture and investigate the possibility to impose that scalar interactions dominate over gravitational ones. More precisely, we look for consequences of assuming that, for leading scalar interactions, the corresponding gravitational contribution is sub-dominant in the non-relativistic limit. For a single massive scalar particle, this leads us to compare four-point self-interactions in different type of potentials. For axion-like particles, we retrieve the result of the axion weak gravity conjecture: the decay constant f is bounded by the Planck mass, $$f < {M_{Pl}}$$f<MPl. Similar bounds are obtained for exponential potentials. For quartic, power law and Starobinsky potentials, we exclude large trans-Planckian field excursions. We then discuss the case of moduli that determine the scalars masses. We retrieve the exponential dependence as requested by the Swampland distance conjecture. We also find extremal state masses with field dependence that reproduces both the Kaluza-Klein and winding modes behaviour. In particular cases, our constraints can be put in the form of the Refined de Sitter Conjecture.