Quasi-evaporating black holes and cold dark matter

Abstract: Vilkovisky has claimed to have solved the black hole backreaction problem and finds that black holes lose only ten percent of their mass to Hawking radiation before evaporation ceases. We examine the implications of this scenario for cold dark matter, assuming that primordial black holes are created during the reheating period after inflation. The mass spectrum is expected to be dominated by 10-gram black holes. Nucleosynthesis constraints and the requirement that the earth presently exist do not come close to ruling out such black holes as dark matter candidates. They also evade the demand that the photon density produced by evaporating primordial black holes does not exceed the present cosmic radiation background by a factor of about one thousand.