- Sept. 23, 2024, 2:00 am US/Central
- Zachary Picker, University of California, Los Angeles
Black holes are (re)emerging into one of the most exciting dark matter candidates. I will attempt a holistic overview of this niche of the astroparticle world, looking at observations, constraints, exotic phenomenology, and perhaps most importantly, their formation. It turns out that there is a surprisingly rich variety of formation mechanisms for primordial black holes—in particular, black holes are in the spectrum of many of our favorite BSM theories. After completely convincing you that black holes are thus compelling, I will discuss some details of our ongoing research into the formation of black holes in a self-interacting dark sector. Such a dark sector readily forms a ‘cold’ population of dark macroscopic objects which can later collapse into black holes, providing a rather simple mechanism for the creation of black holes at arbitrarily late times in the universe. If these (non-primordial) black holes are small enough, they could even be created and then rapidly evaporated today, leading to observable consequences such as a gamma ray spectrum which matches the GeV excess quite nicely.