The recently proposed UV self-complete quantum gravity program is a new and very
interesting way to envision Planckian/trans-Planckian physics. in this new frame-
work, high energy scattering is dominated by the creation of micro black holes, and
it is experimentally impossible to probe distances shorter than the horizon radius.
In this letter we present a model which realizes this idea through the creation of self-
regular quantum black holes admitting a minimal size extremal configuration. Their
radius provides a dynamically generated minimal length acting as a universal short-
distance cutoff. We propose a quantization scheme for this new kind of microscopic
objects based on a Bohr-like approach, which does not require a detailed knowledge
of quantum gravity. The resulting black hole quantum picture resembles the energy
spectrum of a quantum harmonic oscillator. The mass of the extremal configuration
plays the role of zero-point energy. Large quantum number re-establish the classi-
cal black hole description. Finally, we also formulate a “quantum hoop conjecture”
which is satisfied by all the mass eigenstates and sustains the existence of quantum
black holes sourced by Gaussian matter distributions.
