HEP Theory Journal Club

Holographic Violations of ETH and the Weak Gravity Conjecture

Nima Afkhami-Jeddi

McGill

We show that holographic CFTs with a global U (1) symmetry have states violating the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis if their spectrum contains a particle satisfying a form of the weak gravity conjecture. These states are dual to metastable configurations in the asymptotically AdS bulk. In the semi-classical regime, they correspond to charged particles hovering outside Reissner-Nordstrom black holes. We compute the life times of these configurations, which decay by tunneling into the black hole. We also find further evidence for slow thermalization by computing the quasinormal modes corresponding to charged scalar perturbations in RN-AdS backgrounds.