system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
A question about micro black holes and Hawking radiation.

How is a micro black hole (<1 yoctometer) able to absorb particles that are larger than it's diameter?
gpt
Particles don't really have a diameter. Instead, they have a *wavelength.* The wavelength of a particle is a function of its energy, and it can be thought of as a sort of minimum bound on localizing that particle. You can't ever say that a particle with wavelength X is localized to a region Y, if Y is smaller than X.

This comes up in the study of black hole thermodynamics. What is the *smallest amount of energy* a black hole can gain? It's the energy of a photon with wavelength equal to the diameter of the black hole. If the photon has a wavelength longer than that, it won't interact with the black hole at all. (For more on this, if you're interested, consult the work of Jacob Bekenstein.

The other thing to remember is that very small black holes — if they exist at all, which is not at all clear — would vanish almost immediately in a burst of Hawking radiation. The temperature of a black hole is *inversely* proportional to its surface area. The bigger the black hole, the colder it is. A very small black hole would have a truly astronomical temperature, and would very quickly radiate all its energy away as blackbody radiation.