  It has long been known that matter charged under a broken U(1) gauge symmetry
collapsing to form a black hole will radiate away the associated external
(massive) gauge field. We show that the timescale for the radiation of the
monopole component of the field will be on the order of the inverse Compton
wavelength of the gauge boson (assuming natural units). Since the Compton
wavelength for a massive gauge boson is directly related to the scale of
symmetry breaking, the timescale for a black hole to lose its gauge field
"hair" is determined only by this scale. The timescale for Hawking radiation,
however, is set by the mass of the black hole. These different dependencies
mean that for any (sub-Planckian) scale of symmetry breaking we can define a
mass below which black holes radiate quickly enough to discharge themselves via
the Hawking process before the gauge field is radiated away. This has important
implications for the extrapolation of classical black hole physics to
Planck-scale virtual black holes. In particular, we comment on the implications
for protecting protons from gravitationally mediated decay.
