JOINT PARTICLE SEMINAR

Date: Wednesday, 15 October 2003 Time: 3:00 p.m.

Place: 4135 Frederick Reines Hall

Speaker: Pisin Chen, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Title: Might Dark Matter Actually be Black?

Abstract: There have been proposals that primordial black hole remnants (BHRs) are the dark matter (DM), but the idea is somewhat vague. We argue that the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) may prevent black holes from evaporating completely, in a similar way that the standard uncertainty principle prevents the hydrogen atom from collapsing. Combining this with hybrid inflation model we show that Planck-size BHRs can indeed provide enough abundance for dark matter. By assuming BHR as DM, our notion imposes a constraint on the hybrid inflation potential. We show that a wide range of hybrid inflation parameters satisfy this constraint, and that the model is not so fine-tuned.

Host: J. Feng