Dark baryon black holes

<p> We explore a novel mechanism for dark matter production through the formation of light black holes from the collapse of dark baryons in confining SU(N) gauge theories in the large- <math display='inline'> <mi>N</mi> </math> limit. While glueballs and mesons cannot form black holes under physically reasonable conditions, we prove that for appropriate ranges of the confinement scale, quark masses, number of colors <math display='inline'> <mi>N</mi> </math> , and dark sector temperature, dark baryons can produce Planck-scale black hole relics in the early Universe. Assuming the relics are stable, the abundance of both the dark baryon black hole population directly arising at confinement and that frozen in from dark glueball and meson pair annihilation are exponentially suppressed in <math display='inline'> <mi>N</mi> </math> , leading to an upper limit <math display='inline'> <mi>N</mi> <mo>≲</mo> <mn>100</mn> </math> and of a few hundred Planck units in mass for models where the black hole relics are the entirety of the dark matter. We present a detailed numerical study of the parameter space where this scenario is realized. </p> <sec> <title/> <supplementary-material> <permissions> <copyright-statement>Published by the American Physical Society</copyright-statement> <copyright-year>2025</copyright-year> </permissions> </supplementary-material> </sec>. Authors: Profumo, Stefano (ORCID:0000000291597556). DOE Contract: SC0010107