The Hawking cascades of gravitons from higher-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the Hawking evaporation process of $(3+1)$-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes is characterized by the dimensionless ratio $η\equivτ_{\text{gap}}/τ_{\text{emission}}\gg1$, where $τ_{\text{gap}}$ is the characteristic time gap between the emissions of successive Hawking quanta and $τ_{\text{emission}}$ is the characteristic timescale required for an individual Hawking quantum to be emitted from the Schwarzschild black hole. This strong inequality implies that the Hawking cascade of gravitons from a $(3+1)$-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole is extremely {\it sparse}. In the present paper we explore the semi-classical Hawking evaporation rates of {\it higher}-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes. We find that the dimensionless ratio $η(D)\equiv{τ_{\text{gap}}/{τ_{\text{emission}}}}$, which characterizes the Hawking emission of gravitons from the $(D+1)$-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes, is a {\it decreasing} function of the spacetime dimension. In particular, we show that higher-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes with $D\gtrsim 10$ are characterized by the relation $η(D)<1$. Our results thus imply that, contrary to the $(3+1)$-dimensional case, the characteristic Hawking cascades of gravitons from these higher-dimensional black holes have a {\it continuous} character.