Primordial Black Holes - Recent Developments

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress on primordial black holes, focusing on their formation, evaporation, and implications for early universe physics, gravitational collapse, high energy physics, and quantum gravity, highlighting their potential as probes of fundamental physics.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent developments across multiple fields, emphasizing how PBHs can constrain theories in cosmology, gravitational physics, and quantum gravity, especially with new observational and theoretical insights.

Findings

PBHs can constrain inflationary models and early universe conditions.

Evaporating PBHs may produce observable gamma-ray bursts and cosmic rays.

Small black holes could reveal signatures of extra dimensions and quantum gravity effects.

Abstract

Recent developments in the study of primordial black holes (PBHs) will be reviewed, with particular emphasis on their formation and evaporation. PBHs could provide a unique probe of the early Universe, gravitational collapse, high energy physics and quantum gravity. Indeed their study may place interesting constraints on the physics relevant to these areas even if they never formed. In the "early Universe" context, particularly useful constraints can be placed on inflationary scenarios, especially if evaporating PBHs leave stable Planck-mass relicts. In the "gravitational collapse" context, the existence of PBHs could provide a unique test of the sort of critical phenomena discovered in recent numerical calculations. In the "high energy physics" context, information may come from gamma-ray bursts (if a subset of these are generated by PBH explosions) or from cosmic rays (if some of these derive from evaporating PBHs). In the "quantum gravity" context, the formation and evaporation of small black holes could lead to observable signatures in cosmic ray events and accelerator experiments, providing there are extra dimensions and providing the quantum gravity scale is around a TeV.