Extremal Black Hole Decay in de Sitter Space

Abstract

The decay of extremal charged black holes has been a useful guidance to derive consistency conditions in quantum gravity. In de Sitter space it has been argued that requiring (extremal) charged Nariai black holes to decay without forming a big crunch singularity yields the Festina Lente (FL) bound: particles with mass $m_s$ and charge $q$ should satisfy $m_s^2 \gg M_pHq$, where $M_p$ is the Planck mass and $H$ the Hubble parameter. Using a tunneling approach we show that the decay probability of charged black holes in de Sitter space in the s-wave sector is $P\sim \exp(\Delta S_b)$, where~$\Delta S_b$ is the change in the black hole entropy. We find that the FL bound corresponds to $\Delta S_b \leq -1$ in the Nariai and probe limit. However, taking into account backreaction we identify unsuppressed decay channels, which might be subdominant, that violate this bound but nonetheless do not result in a big crunch for every observer.