Bounds on extra dimensions from micro black holes in the context of the metastable Higgs vacuum

Abstract

We estimate the rate at which collisions between ultra-high energy cosmic rays can form small black holes in models with extra dimensions. If recent conjectures about false vacuum decay catalyzed by black hole evaporation apply, the lack of vacuum decay events in our past light cone may place new bounds on the black hole formation rate and thus on the fundamental scale of gravity in these models. For theories with fundamental scale $E_{\ast }$ above the Higgs instability scale of the Standard Model, we find a lower bound on $E_{\ast }$ that is within about an order of magnitude of the energy where the cosmic ray spectrum begins to show suppression from the GZK effect. Otherwise, the abundant formation of semiclassical black holes with short lifetimes would likely initiate vacuum decay. Assuming a Higgs instability scale at the low end of the range compatible with experimental data, the excluded range is approximately $10^{17}\text{eV}\lesssim E_{\ast }\le 10^{18.8}\text{eV}$ for theories with $n=1$ extra dimension, narrowing to $10^{17}\text{eV}\lesssim E_{\ast }\le 10^{18.1}\text{eV}$ for $n=6$. These bounds rule out regions of parameter space that are inaccessible to collider experiments, small-scale gravity tests, or estimates of Kaluza-Klein processes in neutron stars and supernovae.

10 pages, 5 figures; v2: Revised discussion of the excluded range for the fundamental scale, updated figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Connecting the Higgs Potential and Primordial Black Holes
• Signatures of microscopic black holes and extra dimensions at future neutrino telescopes
• Vacuum decay in the Lorentzian path integral
• Higgs chameleon
• Discovery and spectroscopy of dark matter and dark sectors with microscopic black holes at next generation colliders