Implications of the weak gravity conjecture for tidal Love numbers of black holes
Valerio De Luca, Justin Khoury, Sam S. C. Wong
Abstract
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.