Dark Matter from Planck-Scale Black Hole Remnants

The nature of dark matter is one of the deepest unresolved questions in physics. The leading candidates—WIMPs, axions, sterile neutrinos—have not been detected despite decades of experimental effort.

The canvas model predicts a dark matter candidate with no free parameters: Planck-mass black holes formed directly at the Planck epoch. In the canvas model, spacetime is a discrete voxel lattice with minimum spacing equal to the Planck length. A black hole cannot be smaller than this minimum. The smallest possible black hole has a mass of order the Planck mass—about 10^-8 kilograms.

These Planck-mass black holes formed naturally at the Planck epoch, when the universe itself was Planck-sized and density perturbations were of order unity. The production fraction—how much of the primordial energy density collapsed into these objects—is set by the same scale separation that gives the Born rule. For a formation fraction of about 25 percent, the present-day abundance matches the observed dark matter density.

The remnants are stable—there is no lower-mass state to decay into. They interact only gravitationally, with a cross-section of 10^-70 square meters—twenty-three orders of magnitude smaller than WIMPs. Direct detection is impossible with current or foreseeable technology. This explains why dark matter has eluded every detection attempt: it is fundamentally undetectable by conventional means.

The candidate requires no new particles, no new symmetries, and no free parameters. It is an inevitable consequence of discrete spacetime at the Planck scale—the same discrete structure that resolves black hole singularities, the cosmological constant problem, and the strong CP problem.