Dark Baryon Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new dark matter production mechanism involving the formation of Planck-scale black holes from dark baryons in confining gauge theories, with implications for dark matter abundance and model parameters.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dark baryons can produce stable black hole relics under certain conditions, a novel dark matter candidate in confining gauge theories.

Findings

Dark baryons can form Planck-scale black holes in the early universe.

Black hole relic abundance is exponentially suppressed with increasing N.

Upper limit on N is approximately 100 for dark matter models.

Abstract

We explore a novel mechanism for dark matter production through the formation of light black holes from the collapse of dark baryons in confining SU(N) gauge theories in the large $N$ limit. While glueballs and mesons cannot form black holes under physically reasonable conditions, we prove that for appropriate ranges of the confinement scale, quark masses, number of colors $N$, and dark sector temperature, dark baryons can produce Planck-scale black hole relics in the early universe. Assuming the relics are stable, the abundance of both the dark baryon black hole population directly arising at confinement and that frozen in from dark glueball and meson pair annihilation are exponentially suppressed in $N$, leading to an upper limit $N\lesssim 100$ and of a few hundreds Planck units in mass for models where the black hole relics are the entirety of the dark matter. We present a detailed numerical study of the parameter space where this scenario is realized.