String Theory Journal Club

In this talk, I will review some of the recent developments in understanding black holes near-extremality. For such black holes, below a certain temperature, one expects a breakdown of black hole thermodynamics. In the past, this had led to the prediction of the existence of a mass gap between the mass of an extremal black hole and its lightest excited state. Following https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02860, I will discuss how the problem of higher dimensional near extremal black holes can be reduced to a well-studied model of JT gravity, and subsequently, show how one can probe the existence of the mass gap in different models.