Evolution of near-extremal black holes

Abstract

Near-extreme black holes can lose their charge and decay by the emission of massive Bogomol'ni-Prasad-Sommerfield charged particles. We calculate the greybody factors for low-energy charged and neutral scalar emission from four- and five-dimensional near extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes. We use the corresponding emission rates to obtain ratios of the rates of loss of excess energy by charged and neutral emission, which are moduli independent, depending only on the integral charges and the horizon potentials. We consider scattering experiments, finding that evolution towards a state in which the integral charges are equal is favored, but neutral emission will dominate the decay back to extremality except when one charge is much greater than the others. The implications of our results for the agreement between black hole and $D$-brane emission rates and for the information loss puzzle are then discussed.