Effect of the memory burden on primordial black hole hot spots

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Authors: Nathaniel Levy, Lucien Heurtier
Cited by: 1
References: 81

Abstract

When primordial black holes (PBHs) evaporate, they deposit energy in the surrounding plasma, leading to temperature gradients, or , which evolve during the evaporation process. Motivated by recent studies suggesting that a memory burden may slow down PBH evaporation, we explore how a suppression of the evaporation rate affects the morphology of such hot spots. We include such a suppression in the form of transfer functions and derive general formulas for the hot-spot core temperature and radius. Applying our results to illustrative scenarios, we find that, in the vanilla memory burden scenario in which the evaporation rate and Hawking temperature are exactly constant, the hot-spot temperature is substantially lowered. Nonetheless, we show that alternative scenarios may lead to sizable hot spots with morphologies that differ significantly from the semiclassical case.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Black Holes and Theoretical Physics Cosmology and Gravitation Theories Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations

Publication details

Journal / source
Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Volume
113
Issue
4
Publication date
23 January 2026
Language
EN