One-loop effect in the charged 2D black hole near extremality

Abstract

We study the one-loop correction to the near-extremal quantum entropy of the charged two-dimensional black hole introduced in \cite{McGuigan:1992}. In target space this background can be understood as arising from the dimensional reduction of a three-dimensional solution of the low-energy string effective action. On the other hand, its worldsheet description is provided by the dimensionally reduced $\frac{SL(2, \mathbb{R}) \times U(1)}{U(1)}$ WZW model. Using the latter formulation, we extract the temperature dependence of the one-loop correction to the near-extremal quantum entropy from the corresponding torus partition function. Based on the nearly-$AdS_2$ structure of the near-extremal near-horizon geometry of this black hole, one might naively expect to recover the usual logarithmic correction associated with the universal Schwarzian sector. Remarkably, the final result deviates from this expectation. In the general case, the one-loop correction we obtain is exponentially suppressed in the low-temperature limit. However, upon fine-tuning the microscopic parameters of the theory, specifically the level of the $\mathfrak{sl}_k(2,\mathbb{R)}$ current algebra and the worldsheet coupling constant between $SL(2,\mathbb{R)}$ and the $U(1)$ boson, the correction scales as $\sqrt{\beta}$. In this limit, the target-space partition function is divergent in the extremal regime. We argue that this result provides a worldsheet realization of the black hole/string transition.