Correspondence between the physics of extremal black holes and that of stable heavy atomic nuclei

Abstract

Extremal black holes are immune of Hawking evaporation. On the other hand, some heavy atomic nuclei feature extraordinary stability to spontaneous transmutations changing their mass numbers. The fact that extremal black holes and stable nuclei share a common trait, that of defying spontaneous ejection of their constituents, suggests that a good part of nuclear physics is modelled on physics of extremal black holes through a simple version of gauge/gravity duality. A general criterion for discriminating between stable and unstable microscopic systems can be formulated to gain a new insight into some imperfectly understood phenomena, such as instability of truly neutral spinless particles (Higgs bosons, $\pi_0$, quarkonia, glueballs).