Black Holes, Moduli, and Long-Range Forces

Abstract

It is well known that an identical pair of extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes placed a large distance apart will exert no force on each other. In this paper, I establish that the same result holds in a very large class of two-derivative effective theories containing an arbitrary number of gauge fields and moduli, where the appropriate analog of an extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole is a charged, spherically symmetric black hole with vanishing surface gravity or vanishing horizon area. Analogous results hold for black branes.