Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the decay of charged black holes in de
Sitter space. We will establish how black hole mass and charge change
over time due to both Hawking radiation and Schwinger pair production
as a function of the masses and charges of the elementary particles in
the theory.
By demanding that black holes decay 'sensibly', one can constrain the
spectrum of allowed particles in a theory in an interesting way. This
fits into the larger picture of the Swampland program of constraining
effective field theories by demanding they can be completed into
consistent quantum gravity theories.
We will find a lower bound on the mass of charged particles by
demanding that large charged black holes evaporate back to empty de
Sitter space, in accordance with the thermal picture of the de Sitter
static patch. This bound is satisfied by the charged spectrum of the
Standard Model. This bound has phenomenological implications for the
cosmological hierarchy problem and inflation. The bound has a nice
interplay with other constraints obtained in the swampland program.
The bound can be applied to argue against the consistency of certain
de Sitter supergravity models.
There has been much discussion about the consistency of de Sitter
vacua in string theory and quantum gravity. Interestingly, proposed
string theory constructions of de Sitter vacua involving uplifting
warped throats such as KKLT and LVS seem at present to satisfy both
our bound and the weak gravity conjecture.