Sunday, March 29, 2009

Small black holes

Micro black holes, are tiny hypothetical black holes also called quantum mechanical black holes or mini black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role.
In principle, a black hole can have any mass significantly above the Planck mass. In 1974 Stephen Hawking argued that due to quantum effects, such black holes "evaporate" by
a process now referred to as Hawking Radiation in which elementary particles (photons, electrons, quarks, gluons, etc.) are emitted. His calculations show that the smaller the size of the black hole, the faster the evaporation rate, resulting in a sudden burst of particles as the micro black hole suddenly explodes. It is possible that such quantum primordial black holes were created in the high-density environment of the early universe (or big bang), or possibly through subsequent phase transitions.