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  • Open Access

Effect of the memory burden on primordial black hole hot spots

Nathaniel Levy1,2,* and Lucien Heurtier2,†

  • *Contact author: nathaniel.levy@stx.ox.ac.uk
  • †Contact author: lucien.heurtier@kcl.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 043037 – Published 18 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zhrp-yj6l

Abstract

When primordial black holes (PBHs) evaporate, they deposit energy in the surrounding plasma, leading to temperature gradients, or hot spots, which evolve during the evaporation process. Motivated by recent studies suggesting that a memory burden may slow down PBH evaporation, we explore how a suppression of the evaporation rate affects the morphology of such hot spots. We include such a suppression in the form of transfer functions and derive general formulas for the hot-spot core temperature and radius. Applying our results to illustrative scenarios, we find that, in the vanilla memory burden scenario in which the evaporation rate and Hawking temperature are exactly constant, the hot-spot temperature is substantially lowered. Nonetheless, we show that alternative scenarios may lead to sizable hot spots with morphologies that differ significantly from the semiclassical case.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 043037– Published 18 February, 2026
  • Received 19 December 2025
  • Accepted 23 January 2026
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