Decay of Graviton Condensates and their Generalizations in Arbitrary Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decay properties of classicalons, including black holes, in arbitrary dimensions, revealing their stability, decay enhancement, and relation to quantum phase transitions, with implications for cosmology and physics.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of classicalon decay in various dimensions, highlighting stability conditions and decay enhancements beyond black holes.

Findings

Decay of classicalons is generally enhanced compared to black holes.

Higher dimensional graviton condensates match Hawking radiation due to non-linearities.

All condensates are stable at large mass, with effective coupling scaling inversely with constituents.

Abstract

Classicalons are self-bound classical field configurations, which include black holes in General Relativity. In quantum theory, they are described by condensates of many soft quanta. In this work, their decay properties are studied in arbitrary dimensions. It is found that generically the decays of other classicalons are enhanced compared to pure graviton condensates, ie. black holes. The evaporation of higher dimensional graviton condensates turns out to match Hawking radiation solely due to non-linearites captured by the classicalon picture. Although less stable than black holes, all self-bound condensates are shown to be stable in the limit of large mass. Like for black holes, the effective coupling always scales as the inverse of the number of constituents, indicating that these systems are at critical points of quantum phase transitions. Consequences for cosmology, astro- and collider physics are briefly discussed.