Primordial black holes that survive until the present have been considered as a dark matter candidate. In this paper we argue that primordial 2-2-hole remnants provide a more promising and testable alternative. 2-2-holes arise in quadratic gravity as a new family of classical solutions for ultracompact matter distributions and they possess the black hole exterior without an event horizon. They may serve as the endpoint of gravitational collapse, providing a resolution for the information loss problem. Intriguing thermodynamic behavior is found for these objects when sourced by a thermal gas. A large 2-2-hole radiates with a Hawking-like temperature and exhibits an entropy-area law. At a late stage, the evaporation slows down and essentially stops as the mass asymptotically approaches a minimal value. This remnant mass is determined by a fundamental scale in quadratic gravity. We study the cosmological and astrophysical implications of having these remnants as dark matter and derive the corresponding constraints. A distinctive phenomenon associated with remnant mergers occurs, predicting fluxes of high-energy astrophysical particles due to the spectacular evaporation of the merger product. Measurements of high-energy photon and neutrino fluxes could possibly bound the remnant mass to be not far above the Planck mass. Early universe physics, on the other hand, requires that 2-2-holes quickly evolve into the remnant state after formation, putting an upper bound on the formation mass.

• Received 2 April 2020
• Accepted 8 July 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.024058