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Black holes as bubble nucleation sites

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We consider the effect of inhomogeneities on the rate of false vacuum decay. Modelling the inhomogeneity by a black hole, we construct explicit Euclidean instantons which describe the nucleation of a bubble of true vacuum centred on the inhomogeneity. We find that inhomogeneity significantly enhances the nucleation rate over that of the Coleman-de Luccia instanton -- the black hole acts as a nucleation site for the bubble. The effect is larger than previously believed due to the contributions to the action from conical singularities. For a sufficiently low initial mass, the original black hole is replaced by flat space during this process, as viewed by a single causal patch observer. Increasing the initial mass, we find a critical value above which a black hole remnant survives the process. This resulting black hole can have a higher mass than the original black hole, but always has a lower entropy. We compare the process to bubble-to-bubble transitions, where there is a semi-classical Lorentzian description in the WKB approximation.

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2026 3 2020 1

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representative citing papers

Constraints on Primordial Black Holes

astro-ph.CO · 2020-02-27 · accept · novelty 4.0

Updated compilation shows PBHs are tightly constrained across 55 orders of magnitude in mass, ruling out dominant dark matter contributions except in narrow windows, with many limits carrying observational uncertainties.

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Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.