Probing the Particle Spectrum of Nature with Evaporating Black Holes

Abstract

Photons radiated from an evaporating black hole in principle provide complete information on the particle spectrum of nature up to the Planck scale. If an evaporating black hole were to be observed, it would open a unique window onto models beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. To demonstrate this, we compute the limits that could be placed on the size of a dark sector. We find that observation of an evaporating black hole at a distance of 0.01 parsecs could probe dark sector models containing one or more copies of the Standard Model particles, with any mass scale up to 100 TeV.

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures; v2: updated to correctly account for dominant background, conclusions unchanged. Expanded discussion of other current and future experiments, and of limits on the chance of observation; v3: updated to match journal version