Related papers: Compact objects as the catalysts for vacuum decays
Exotic compact objects with physical surfaces a Planckian distance away from where the horizon would have been are inspired in quantum gravity. Most of these objects are defined by a classical spacetime metric, such as boson stars,…
One of the main predictions of general relativity is the existence of black holes featuring a horizon beyond which nothing can escape. Gravitational waves from the remnants of compact binary coalescences have the potential to probe new…
Higgs vacuum stability has important consequences for cosmology. In particular, we argue that if the Higgs vacuum is metastable, then the dark matter cannot contain a single black hole of mass less than $10^{15}{\rm g}$ in our entire past…
Black holes emit high energy particles which induce a finite density potential for any scalar field $\phi$ coupling to the emitted quanta. Due to energetic considerations, $\phi$ evolves locally to minimize the effective masses of the…
Stupendously large black holes exceeding $10^{11} M_\odot$ could exist, supported by recent observations of unexpectedly massive black holes at high redshifts. These objects may constitute a part of dark matter or even dark energy. One…
By comparing the results from numerical microlensing simulations to the observed long-term variability of quasars, strong upper limits on the cosmological density of compact objects in the 0.0001-1 solar mass range may in principle be…
The recent advancements in black hole imaging have opened a new era of probing horizon-scale physics with electromagnetic radiation. However, a feature of the observed images, a bright ring encircling a relatively dark region, has not…
We address the long-standing puzzle of false vacuum decay catalyzed by black holes. Naively, small black holes with large Hawking temperatures can generate highly-boosted true vacuum bubbles in the early universe and trigger vacuum decay…
We study the effect of primordial black holes on the classical rate of nucleation of AdS regions within the standard electroweak vacuum at high temperature. We find that the energy barrier for transitions to the new vacuum, which determines…
We argue that the weak coupling regime of a large N gauge theory in the Higgs phase contains black hole-like objects. These so-called ``plasma puddles'' are meta-stable lumps of hot plasma lying in locally un-Higgsed regions of space. They…
In the gravitational field of a Schwarzschild-like black hole, particles infalling from rest at infinity, and black hole "wind" particles with relativistic velocity leaking radially out from the nominal horizon, both have the same magnitude…
We have recently suggested that tiny black holes can act as nucleation seeds for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. Previous results applied only to the nucleation of thin-wall bubbles, and covered a very small region of parameter…
We make the case for the existence of a, hitherto unknown and unobserved, hierarchy of ever more compact cosmic objects in the universe. This hypothesis is based on i) the assumption of "elementary" particle sub-constituents on several…
We review models which include advective accretion disks onto compact objects and discuss the influence of the centrifugal pressure supported high density region close to the compact objects on the emitted spectra. We show that the…
Previously it was shown that gravitation theory allows the existance of supermassive stable compact configurations of the degenerated electronic gas (L.V.Verozub, Astr. Nacr. 317 (1996) 107) without events horizon. In the present paper the…
We argue that the rate of Standard Model vacuum or thermal decay seeded by primordial black holes is negligible (because non-perturbatively suppressed by the small quartic Higgs coupling) and independent of the non-minimal coupling of the…
We study zero-temperature false vacuum decay in $D$ compact spatial dimensions and show that for volumes below a critical value a new bounce solution, different from Coleman's celebrated $O(D)$ bubble, mediates the decay process, and…
We consider collision of two particles near the horizon of a nonextremal static black hole. At least one of them is accelerated. We show that the energy $E_{c.m.}$ in the center of mass can become unbounded in spite of the fact that a black…
We discuss a cosmology in which cold dark-matter particles decay into relativistic particles. We argue that such decays could lead naturally to a bulk viscosity in the cosmic fluid. For decay lifetimes comparable to the present hubble age,…
This talk reviews our recent work showing how tiny black holes can act as nucleation sites for the decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum. We start by discussing the formation of thin wall bubbles of true vacuum inside a false vacuum, and…