High Energy Theory Seminar

The weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is a proposed bound on the mass of a charged particle in a consistent low-energy effective theory. We study quantum corrections to black hole entropy arising from a charged but WGC-violating scalar. In particular, we study the laws of black hole thermodynamics, and identify several surprising features which contradict the second and third laws in various regimes. This result is strong evidence that the WGC is necessary for a consistent theory.