Black Holes Coupled to a Massive Dilaton

J. Horne, G. Horowitz

Published 1992-10-02, updated 1992-10-06Version 2

We investigate charged black holes coupled to a massive dilaton. It is shown that black holes which are large compared to the Compton wavelength of the dilaton resemble the Reissner-Nordstr\"om solution, while those which are smaller than this scale resemble the massless dilaton solutions. Black holes of order the Compton wavelength of the dilaton can have wormholes outside the event horizon in the string metric. Unlike all previous black hole solutions, nearly extremal and extremal black holes (of any size) repel each other. We argue that extremal black holes are quantum mechanically unstable to decay into several widely separated black holes. We present analytic arguments and extensive numerical results to support these conclusions.