(Anti-)evaporation of Schwarzschild–de Sitter black holes

We study the quantum evolution of black holes immersed in a de Sitter background space. For black holes whose size is comparable to that of the cosmological horizon, this process differs significantly from the evaporation of asymptotically flat black holes. Our model includes the one-loop effective action in the s-wave and large N approximation. Black holes of the maximal mass are in equilibrium. Unexpectedly, we find that nearly maximal quantum Schwarzschild–de Sitter black holes anti-evaporate. However, there is a different perturbative mode that leads to evaporation. We show that this mode will always be excited when a pair of cosmological holes nucleates.