A Dyson sphere around a black hole

Better link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15181

The results are fairly obvious: CMB and Hawking radiation provide almost zero power output, while an accretion disk and relativistic jets can provide a lot of power.

Oh cool, CC-BY!

In theory you can get an arbitrary amount of power from Hawking radiation if you have a lot of very small black holes instead of just one big one. I feel like the stability of the negative-feedback control systems for their orbits might be important here, especially if they're orbiting something you care about like your home planet.

As far as I understand, small black holes could be used as a super efficient energy storage („Kugelblitz“), but hardly as a source, assuming that primordial black holes are rare. Primordial black holes afaik are the only theorized origin of a sub stellar mass black hole at this stage of the universe‘s timeline.

Yeah, making tiny black holes could be pretty challenging, but I feel like it's just an engineering challenge. Is there a fundamental reason I'm missing that you can't just build a really precise, solar-system-scale particle accelerator to slam together a lot of mass into a tiny space to make tiny black holes?

Crane and Westmoreland looked into this: "Are Black Hole Starships Possible" (2009) https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1

A black hole is generated when mass-energy density is above a certain threshold. You need to pack about a megatonne of mass-energy in a sphere 3 attometers in diameter to get a black hole approaching a useful lifespan. You could do it with bosonic matter, but photons are easier. Well, "easier":

>In Section V below, we discuss the plausibility of creating SBHs with a very large spherically converging gamma ray laser. A radius of 1 attometer corresponds to the wavelength of a gamma ray with an energy of about 1.24 TeV. Since the wavelength of the Hawking radiation is 8π^2 times the radius of the BH, the Hawking temperature of a BH with this radius is on the order of 16 GeV, within the limit of what we could hope to achieve technologically.

>[...]

>In a previous paper by the first author [9], it was proposed that a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form. An advantage of using photons is that, since they are bosons, there is no Pauli exclusion principle to worry about. Although a laser powered black hole generator presents huge engineering challenges, the concept appears to be physically sound according to classical general relativity.

The process of aligning the laser array will be interesting, however. From Wikipedia:

>Unlike most objects, a black hole's temperature increases as it radiates away mass. The rate of temperature increase is exponential, with the most likely endpoint being the dissolution of the black hole in a violent burst of gamma rays. A complete description of this dissolution requires a model of quantum gravity, however, as it occurs when the black hole's mass approaches 1 Planck mass, when its radius will also approach two Planck lengths.

See table 2 from the paper. A 0.32 attometer wide black hole has a surface temperature of 98.1GeV and is losing 61.4 kilograms per second-- 5,519 petawatts of ultra-hard gamma radiation! Even at that diameter it has a sizable weight of 108,000 tonnes, but it doesn't have long to live-- a couple weeks. A poorly collimated laser array will produce undersize black holes which will rapidly evaporate. The paper suggests keeping them well away from Earth, on the other side of the Sun if possible. Not hard-- you'd want to put the array well within the orbit of Mercury for better solar power flux.

This is great, thanks! I hadn't thought about the Pauli exclusion principle problem, which I guess tells you how well I'd understood the problem. And of course I don't know anything about quantum gravity. I was thinking that, for use as a power plant, you want much larger black holes, not only bigger than a proton, but actually bigger than an atom, on the order of a nanometer, for two reasons: first, so that the gamma rays coming out are reasonably low energy (hundreds or thousands of electron volts instead of GeV); second, so that you can continue feeding it with regular baryons instead of keeping your spherically converging laser focused on it. But if you do that, you only get a tiny fraction of a watt out of it, and it's uselessly inefficient; even if you made trillions of these little black holes, the energy payback time of the project is measured in octillions of years if you're feeding useful photons into them.

So the sub-attometer-sized black holes described here seem like they might be a lot more practical than what I was thinking of. But... what does it take to stop TeV gamma rays? (And I guess they might also spew out strange matter and naked truth and the like, but you could probably just toss it back in.)

The billion-tonne gamma-ray laser they're talking about here is absolutely tiny.