Speaker
Miguel Montero
(Instituto de Fisica Teorica UAM-CSIC)
Description
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) predicts the existence of
light charged states in any weakly couple gauge theory also
coupled to gravity, which have been shown to have crucial
consequences to e.g. Large field inflation models. In spite
of the abundance of evidence for the conjecture both via
black hole decay arguments and a plethora of concrete
examples in String Theory, no formal proof of the WGC has
been produced so far. We will provide such a proof in the
restricted case of AdS3 spacetimes, using modular invariance
of the dual CFT. Notably, most of the WGC heuristics based
on black hole evaporation do not apply here. We also discuss
an interesting discrete charge which arises naturally in our
discussion, for which modular invariance is not enough to
show the existence of light charged states. This discrete
symmetry manifests itself as discrete electric hair on BTZ
black holes.
