Black holes and the multiverse

By J. Garriga, A. Vilenkin, Jun Zhang. 2015

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form black holes. The fate of the bubble itself depends on the resulting black hole mass. If the mass is smaller than a certain critical value, the bubble collapses to a singularity. Otherwise, the bubble interior inflates, forming a baby universe, which is connected to the exterior FRW region by a wormhole. A similar black hole formation mechanism operates for spherical domain walls nucleating during inflation. As an illustrative example, we studied the black hole mass spectrum in the domain wall scenario, assuming that domain walls interact with matter only gravitationally. Our results indicate that, depending on the model parameters, black holes produced in this scenario can have significant astrophysical effects and can even serve as dark matter or as seeds for supermassive black holes. The mechanism of black hole formation described in this paper is very generic and has important implications for the global structure of the universe. Baby universes inside super-critical black holes inflate eternally and nucleate bubbles of all vacua allowed by the underlying particle physics. The resulting multiverse has a very non-trivial spacetime structure, with a multitude of eternally inflating regions connected by wormholes. If a black hole population with the predicted mass spectrum is discovered, it could be regarded as evidence for inflation and for the existence of a multiverse.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/632aaeac5627fab8ac2e394fe324cf0c622cb776

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Citations in the corpus

A Brief Review on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter (2021, background): “There are, however, other scenarios which naturally predict a population of PBHs as a result of phase transitions in the early Universe and by the collapse of topological defects (Hawking et al., 1982; Hawking, 1989; Polnarev and Zembowicz, 1991; Garriga et al., 2016; Deng et al., 2017; Deng and Vil”
Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “Vilenkin and colleagues have argued that bubbles formed during inflation would (depending on their size) form either black holes or baby universes connected to our Universe by wormholes [91,92].”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[129] Jaume Garriga, Alexander Vilenkin, and Jun Zhang, “Black holes and the multiverse,” JCAP 1602, 064 (2016), arXiv:1512.”
Primordial black hole and wormhole formation by domain walls (2016, methodology): “In our cosmological setting, the fate of the walls depends on their size R at the time ti when inflation ends [1].”