2025/12/17 by Obied, Georges, Reig, Mario
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.15855
openalex publication_date 2025/12/17 · openalex created_date 2025/12/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study some implications of SU(N)× U(1) theories coupled to gravity in the large-N limit. We find that in theories with quarks transforming as q∼ (N,1), black holes (BH) with charge larger than a critical value approach extremality (M\rm BH=√(2) M\rm Pl Q\rm BH) as they evaporate. This occurs because BHs in this theory can only lose charge by emitting baryons, a process suppressed by a combinatoric factor e-Nlog N. Once extremality is reached the BH evolution halts for exponentially long times, τ\rm BH\gtrsim eNlog N, without being protected by any symmetry. At times t≫τ\rm BH the BH forms a cloud of deconfined quarks around it, a quark corona. The quarks are connected to the horizon by strings extending throughout distances that can be much larger than the inverse of the confinement scale, ΛN-1. Strikingly, due to energy conservation, these long strings cannot break even for light quarks. These effects can be further enhanced in clockwork-like theories based on Yang-Mills sectors of the type, SU(N1)× SU(N2)× ...× U(1). As an application to phenomenology, we give examples where BHs as light as one gram survive until today without evaporating, opening up regions of parameter space for primordial BH dark matter previously excluded by Hawking evaporation. This result relies only on large-N combinatorics and is independent of the radiation mechanism from the BH, particle masses, and confinement scale. The theories we discuss pass non-trivial tests imposed by Swampland conjectures, including completeness of the spectrum as well as the weak gravity conjecture.