Würzburg Seminar on Quantum Field Theory and Gravity
Emergence of Species Scale Black Hole Horizons
Datum: | 12.12.2023, 14:45 - 15:45 Uhr |
Ort: | online |
Veranstalter: | Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Physik III |
Vortragende: | José Calderon Infante (CERN) |
The scale at which quantum gravity becomes manifest, the species scale, has recently been argued to take values parametrically lower than the Planck scale in certain regimes. In this talk I will discuss how black holes of vanishing horizon area (small black holes) allow us to relate three different physical manifestations of the species scale: (i) Near the small black hole core, a scalar field runs to infinite distance in moduli space, a regime in which the Swampland Distance Conjecture predicts a tower of exponentially light states, which lower the species scale. (ii) We integrate out modes in the tower and generate via Emergence a set of higher derivative corrections that become relevant at the species scale. (iii) Finally, higher derivative terms modify the black hole solution and grant it a non-zero, species scale sized stretched horizon, showcasing the species scale as the size of the smallest possible black hole describable in the effective theory. I will give special emphasis to the fascinating example of 10d Type IIA black holes with D0-brane charge. The emergence of the species scale horizon for D0-branes requires a non-trivial interplay of different 8-derivative terms in type IIA and M-theory, providing a highly non-trivial check of our unified description of the different phenomena associated to the species scale.