Novel Mechanism for Production of Planck Relics in Third Order Effective Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new mechanism based on third-order effective field theory corrections that predicts the formation of stable Planck-scale black hole remnants, diverging from classical Hawking evaporation predictions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that cubic curvature corrections in effective field theory naturally lead to stable black hole remnants without additional assumptions.

Findings

Evaporation halts at a critical mass, forming stable remnants.

Hawking temperature remains finite or drops to zero depending on correction sign.

Heat capacity shows qualitative changes near the Planck scale.

Abstract

We present a novel mechanism for the formation of Planck-scale black hole remnants, or Planck relics. We use the third-order effective field theory corrections to the Schwarzschild geometry and Hawking temperature obtained in the literature to construct a modified evaporation law that departs significantly from Hawking's classical prediction at small masses. At a critical mass $M_{crit}$, the evaporation process comes to a halt: for $c_6 > 0$ the Hawking temperature remains finite while the leading-order mass-loss rate vanishes, whereas for $c_6 < 0$ the Hawking temperature itself drops to zero. In both cases the black hole mass approaches $M_{crit}$ only asymptotically, so that the evaporation time diverges and the objects become stable remnants. The corrected heat capacity exhibits qualitative departures from Hawking's result near the Planckian regime, with a sign change for $c_6 < 0$ and a shifted extremum for $c_6 > 0$. Our results show that cubic curvature corrections in effective field theory naturally give rise to black hole remnants without invoking ad hoc modifications to Hawking radiation.