Related papers: Black Holes, Moduli Stabilisation and the Swamplan…
These lectures provide a pedagogical, introductory review of the so-called Attractor Mechanism (AM) at work in two different 4-dimensional frameworks: extremal black holes in N=2 supergravity and N=1 flux compactifications. In the first…
Heterotic orbifold compactifications yield a myriad of models that reproduce many properties of the supersymmetric extension of the standard model and provide potential solutions to persisting problems of high energy physics, such as the…
In backgrounds with compact dimensions there may exist several phases of black objects including the black-hole and the black-string. The phase transition between them raises puzzles and touches fundamental issues such as topology change,…
The "swampland conjectures" have been recently suggested as a set of criteria to assess if effective field theories (EFTs) are consistent with a quantum gravity embedding. Such criteria, which restrict the behavior of scalar fields in the…
A model in which black hole scalarization occurs for supermassive black holes, while their less massive counterparts remain unscalarized, has been recently proposed. We explore whether this model can emerge from an effective field theory…
In this talk I will discuss the role of finite temperature quantum corrections in string cosmology and show that they can lead to a stabilization mechanism for the volume moduli. I will show that from the higher dimensional perspective this…
It has recently been shown that if we take into account a class of higher derivative corrections to the effective action of heterotic string theory, the entropy of the black hole solution representing elementary string states correctly…
We consider issues of moduli stabilization and "area codes" for type II flux compactifications, and the "Inverse Problem" and "Fake Superpotentials" for extremal (non)supersymmetric black holes in type II compactifications on (orientifold…
In this paper we discuss black hole solutions parametrized by their entropy $\mathcal{S}$ and temperature $\mathcal{T}$ in gravitational effective theories. We are especially interested in the analysis of the boundary regions in the…
An exact solution representing black holes in an expanding universe is found. The black holes are maximally charged and the universe is expanding with arbitrary equation of state. It is an exact solution of the Einstein-scalar-Maxwell…
Electro-vacuum black holes are scale-invariant; their energy-momentum tensor is traceless. Quantum corrections of various sorts, however, can often produce a trace anomaly and a breakdown of scale-invariance. The (quantum-corrected) black…
We study the attractor mechanism for extremal non-BPS black holes with an infinite throat near horizon geometry, developing, as we do so, a physical argument as to why such a mechanism does not exist in non-extremal cases. We present a…
We look for ways to destabilise the vacuum. We describe how dense matter environments source a contribution to moduli potentials and analyse the conditions required to initiate either decompactification or a local shift in moduli vevs. We…
We show that four-dimensional black holes become stable below certain mass when the Einstein-Hilbert action is supplemented with higher-curvature terms. We prove this to be the case for an infinite family of ghost-free theories involving…
We present an evidence, that the volumes of compactified spaces as well as the areas of black hole horizons must be quantized in Planck units. This quantization has phenomenological consequences, most dramatic being for micro black holes in…
In this paper we explore the idea that black holes can persist in a universe that collapses to a big crunch and then bounces into a new phase of expansion. We use a scalar field to model the matter content of such a universe {near the time}…
We analyse the scalar curvature of the vector multiplet moduli space $\mathcal{M}^{\rm VM}_X$ of type IIA string theory compactified on a Calabi--Yau manifold $X$. While the volume of $\mathcal{M}^{\rm VM}_X$ is known to be finite, cases…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
We examine the interplay between gravitational collapse and moduli stability in the context of black hole formation. We perform numerical simulations of the collapse using the double null formalism and show that the very dense regions one…
It has recently been noted that deformations of extremal AdS black holes in four and higher dimensions are generically non-smooth or singular on the horizon. Further, it was found that certain deformations of asymptotically flat extremal…