Speaker
Description
Can modifications to Hawking evaporation of small black holes be probed by observing gravitational waves from the early Universe? In this talk I will argue that the answer to this tantalizing question may in fact be positive.
It has been recently proposed that Hawking evaporation might slow down significantly after a black hole has lost about half of its mass, considerably extending its lifetime. I will discuss the impact of this so-called "memory burden" effect on the Primordial Black Hole (PBH) reheating scenario, where tiny black holes temporarily dominate the Universe and reheat it via Hawking radiation.
Interestingly, in some models, the slope of the Gravitational Wave (GW) spectrum induced by PBH number density fluctuations might be sensitive to the modifications to Hawking evaporation. In some region of the allowed parameter space, the induced GW signal enters the observational window of several future GW detectors, as e.g. DECIGO and the Einstein Telescope, proving it may soon be possible to test the memory burden effect via induced GWs.
