Determine late-time behavior of PBH evaporation in the memory burden regime

Determine the late-time evaporation behavior of non-spinning, uncharged four-dimensional primordial black holes after the semiclassical approximation breaks down due to the memory burden effect, specifically ascertaining whether the black hole temperature remains fixed at the half-decay value or continues to increase according to T(M) ∝ 1/M, and characterize the corresponding emission-rate evolution, lifetime, and potential explosive outcomes under each scenario.

Background

The paper models Hawking evaporation with a transition at half-decay to a regime where emission is suppressed by a factor depending on the black hole entropy, motivated by the memory burden effect. The authors implement a scenario with fixed temperature after half-decay and mention an alternative in which the temperature continues to rise with decreasing mass, potentially leading to a black hole explosion.

They explicitly state that the late-time behavior beyond the semiclassical regime is not known in sufficient detail and therefore restrict their analysis to the fixed-temperature scenario. Determining the correct late-time dynamics is essential for robust constraints on the primordial black hole dark matter fraction.

References

For simplicity, and since we do not know the late-time behaviour of the black hole in such detail, we will restrict our discussion to the former scenario.

Breakdown of Hawking Evaporation opens new Mass Window for Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter Candidate (2402.17823 - Thoss et al., 27 Feb 2024) in Section 2.4 (Modified evaporation)