Primordial Black Holes Are True Vacuum Nurseries

Abstract

The Hawking evaporation of primordial black holes (PBH) reheats the Universe locally, forming hot spots that survive throughout their lifetime. We propose to use the temperature profile of such hot spots to calculate the decay rate of metastable vacua in cosmology, avoiding inconsistencies inherent to the Hartle-Hawking or Unruh vacuum. We apply our formalism to the case of the electroweak vacuum stability and find that a PBH energy fraction $\beta >7\times 10^{-80}(M/g{)}^{3/2}$ is ruled out for black holes with masses $0.8g<M<10^{15}g$.

7 pages, 3 figures. Prepared for submission to PRL

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Thermalization and hotspot formation around small primordial black holes
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist's Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme
• Revisiting PBH accretion, evaporation and their cosmological consequences
• Evaporation of Primordial Black Holes in a Thermal Universe: A Thermofield Dynamics Approach
• Neutrino Emission and Plasma Heating from Primordial Black Holes: An Improved Approach to $N_{\mathrm{eff}}$ Constraints