Micro black holes and the democratic transition

Abstract

Unitarity implies that the evaporation of microscopic quasiclassical black holes cannot be universal in different particle species. This creates a puzzle, since it conflicts with the thermal nature of quasiclassical black holes, according to which all of the species should see the same horizon and be produced with the same Hawking temperatures. We resolve this puzzle by showing that for the microscopic black holes, on top of the usual quantum evaporation time, there is a new time scale which characterizes a purely classical process during which the black hole loses the ability to differentiate among the species and becomes democratic. We demonstrate this phenomenon in a well-understood framework of large extra dimensions, with a number of parallel branes. An initially nondemocratic black hole is the one localized on one of the branes, with its high-dimensional Schwarzschild radius being much shorter than the interbrane distance. Such a black hole seemingly cannot evaporate into the species localized on the other branes that are beyond its reach. We demonstrate that in reality the system evolves classically in time, in such a way that the black hole accretes the neighboring branes. The end result is a completely democratic static configuration, in which all of the branes share the same black hole and all of the species are produced with the same Hawking temperature. Thus, just like their macroscopic counterparts, the microscopic black holes are universal bridges to the hidden sector physics.