English

Extremal Love: tidal/electromagnetic deformability, logarithmic running and the weak gravity conjecture

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-01-30 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In General Relativity, the tidal Love numbers of black holes vanish, implying they are resistant to tidal deformation. This "rigidity" is easily broken in the presence of higher-derivative corrections. Focusing on extremal charged black holes in Einstein-Maxwell EFT, we compute the static linear response for both the vector (=1\ell=1) and parity-odd tensor (2\ell \ge 2) sectors. We find that the resulting tidal Love numbers are non-zero and exhibit logarithmic running, a hallmark of quantum corrections. Crucially, we show that the sign of these deformations is not arbitrary; the induced electric and magnetic susceptibilities and their log runnings in the =1\ell=1 sector are constrained by unitarity and the Weak Gravity Conjecture. Furthermore, due to gravito-electromagnetic mixing, we find the cross log runnings and show that they are the same, which we explain through the worldline effective field theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.20962,
  title  = {Extremal Love: tidal/electromagnetic deformability, logarithmic running and the weak gravity conjecture},
  author = {Toshifumi Noumi and Sam S. C. Wong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20962},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

33 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:24:32.056Z