Revisit Weak Cosmic Censorship in Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton Black Holes: Third-order Protection, Swampland Distance Conjecture, and Weak Gravity Conjectures

Abstract

We extend the earlier analysis of cosmic censorship and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) in Einstein--Maxwell-dilaton (EMD) theory by performing a complete higher-order Sorce--Wald gedankenexperiment on the static charged Gibbons--Maeda--Garfinkle--Horowitz--Strominger (GMG) black hole. In the probe limit, an extremal GMG black hole can apparently be overcharged by a test particle, seemingly violating the weak cosmic censorship conjecture (WCCC), which is nothing but first-order variational identity in the Iyer--Wald formalism. This window can be closed by either incorporating backreaction via the Hoop Conjecture or further including second-order variational identities. In this paper, we explicitly compute third-order variational identities. The extremality parameter eta remains non-negative to the third perturbative orders confirming WCCC protection, regardless of the apparent failure of all-order generalization, model-independent proof of Lu, et al.. We further incorporate the Swampland Distance Conjecture (SDC): the resulting infinite tower of light charged states discharges any would-be overcharged configuration on a timescale tau much less than 2M, exponentially faster than a horizon can be destroyed, reinforcing WCCC in dynamical regimes and strongly relaxing the original WGC charge-to-mass bound.