
Charged Black Holes and Charged Particle Production
Mykhaylo Usatyuk, speaking in the IAS High Energy Theory Seminar, argues that charged black holes near extremality emit charged particles in ways that reveal quantum gravity corrections beyond the classical Hawking picture. He explains how large metric fluctuations near extremality modify black hole entropies and the spectra of emitted particles, including photons and gravitons, and identifies the regimes where these quantum effects matter and where they do not. The core of the talk derives Hawking's formula for charged particle production by analyzing Schwinger pair production on a charged black hole background, an approach that gives a physical interpretation to the superradiant bound built into Hawking's original formula. Delivered in the Bloomberg Lecture Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study, the seminar is aimed at researchers in gravitational and high energy theory and works through the technical derivation in detail rather than offering a general survey of black hole physics.