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Constraining strongly warped extra dimensions with rotating black holes

Bruno Valeixo Bento1,* and Miquel Salicrú Herberg1,2,†

  • *Contact author: bruno.bento@ift.csic.es
  • †Contact author: miquel.salicru@estudiante.uam.es

Phys. Rev. D 113, 124056 – Published 15 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nspf-h6yw

Abstract

Massive bosonic fields can trigger superradiant instabilities in rotating astrophysical black holes leading to gaps in their mass-spin distribution. For spin-2 fields, the instability timescale is orders of magnitude shorter than for any other superradiant mode, thereby yielding much stronger constraints. We consider a tower of ultralight spin-2 fields arising from a warped compactification of a single extra dimension and translate superradiant constraints on their masses into constraints on the warping. As a concrete scenario we consider the 2-brane Randall-Sundrum model and find constraints on the size of the extra dimension and the curvature of AdS5. We discuss the implications of these bounds for strongly warped throats and D-brane uplifts commonly used in attempts to realize metastable de Sitter vacua in string theory.

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