Sunday, March 09, 2014

Tiny, tiny black holes, again

I haven't spent much time browsing through arXiv lately, which is a pity, because here are a couple of papers of interest spotted today:

here's one suggesting that the early universe could have led to the creation of lots of tiny black hole "atoms", which have the unusual feature of having electrons within them, and no charge, and therefore to be very weakly interacting with anything else.  They are therefore suggested as a candidate for dark matter.  (I'm pretty sure black hole remnants have been suggested as a dark matter candidate before, just not this type of micro black hole.)  Interesting.

here's another paper, much harder to follow, but it is about the blocking of Hawking radiation if a black is inside of a neutron star.  This is of interest because I thought that the safety of the potential micro black holes created in the LHC was based on studies looking at the long term existence of neutron stars.  I am not sure whether those studies considered the potential for the blocking of Hawking Radiation inside of a neutron star which might not exist inside of a planet.  Someone smarter than me would have to look into this.

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