Superradiant instability of charged extremal black holes in Einstein-Born-Infeld gravity

Abstract

We study charged scalar perturbations of charged extremal black holes in Einstein-Born-Infeld theory. Our numerical results indicate that these black holes all suffer from superradiant instability by the unstable quasi-bound states, regardless how small the coupling constant is. We therefore provide a new example that the superradiant stability of the Reissner-Nordström black hole is a fine-tuned result, as in the case when it is embedded in the STU supergravity model. The work is also motivated by the weak gravity conjecture since at the linear coupling constant level, the theory belongs to a subsect of four-derivative corrections in the effective field theory. Our results appear to support the notion that the black holes do decay when gravity is weaker by the correction, but the decaying halftime requires nonlinear effects and cannot be seen at the level of linear coupling constant. The full nonlinear effects also indicate that the black holes can decay even when gravity is stronger.