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  • Open Access

Similarities in the evaporation of saturated solitons and black holes

Giacomo Contri1,2,*, Gia Dvali1,2, and Otari Sakhelashvili1,3

  • *Contact author: contri@mpp.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 125027 – Published 23 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6q41-f43p

Abstract

It has been suggested some time ago that many black hole properties are not specific to gravity, but rather are shared by a large class of objects, the so-called saturons, that saturate the quantum field theoretic upper bound on microstate degeneracy. By now, various aspects of this universality have been understood and demonstrated in a number of explicit examples. In the present paper, we add one more brick to the building by showing that the decay of a simple two-dimensional saturated soliton copies some key aspects of the black hole decay as well as of the information retrieval. In particular, we study the evaporation process of a classically stable vacuum bubble of a spontaneously broken SU(N)-symmetry, coupled to massless fermions. We show that the decay rate as well as the characteristic energy of the emitted quanta are given by the inverse size of the object, in striking similarity with the Hawking evaporation of a black hole. The timescale of information retrieval also matches the one previously suggested for a black hole by Page. We give the semiclassical derivation of the phenomenon as well as its fully quantum resolution as a decaying coherent state of Goldstone bosons. The universal nature of the effect and its microscopic understanding support the analogous quantum portrait of a black hole as a saturated coherent state of gravitons.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 125027– Published 23 December, 2025
  • Received 23 September 2025
  • Accepted 8 December 2025
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