Primordial black holes—perspectives in gravitational wave astronomy

By Misao Sasaki, T. Suyama, Takahiro Tanaka, Shuichiro Yokoyama. 2018

845 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews current understanding of primordial black holes (PBHs), with particular focus on those massive examples (≳1015 g) which remain at the present epoch, not having evaporated through Hawking radiation. With the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, we have gained a completely novel observational tool to search for PBHs, complementary to those using electromagnetic waves. Taking the perspective that gravitational-wave astronomy will make significant progress in the coming decades, the purpose of this article is to give a comprehensive review covering a wide range of topics on PBHs. After discussing PBH formation, as well as several inflation models leading to PBH production, we summarize various existing and future observational constraints. We then present topics on formation of PBH binaries, gravitational waves from PBH binaries, and various observational tests of PBHs using gravitational waves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b07f3ee77776db12541d2e84ee182a0f15e8103

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Citations in the corpus

Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, background): “The PBH binaries formed in the early Universe dominate the present merger rate [11, 12, 19, 55], even though most of these binaries are disrupted by interactions with other PBHs before they merge [14, 17].”
The evolution of primordial black holes and their final observable spins (2020, methodology): “In appendix A we review these two formation scenarios for PBH binaries [10].”
Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “Some authors argue this should be expected [228–232], although there is some controversy about this [233, 234].”
Merging black hole binaries with the SEVN code (2018, background): “…for the formation of ∼30−40 M BHs include primordial BHs (i.e. BHs formed by gravitational instabilities in the very early Universe, e.g. Carr, Kühnel & Sandstad 2016; Sasaki et al. 2018) and second-generation BHs (i.e. BHs formed from the mergers of smaller stellar BHs, Gerosa & Berti 2017).”
Semianalytic calculation of gravitational wave spectrum nonlinearly induced from primordial curvature perturbations (2018, background): “yon-to-photon ratio [45] and the neutron-to-proton ratio [46] (see also Ref. [47]) in BBN, and overproduction of ultracompact minihalos [48,49] or PBHs (for reviews of the constraints, see e.g. Refs. [33,50,51]). 15 Note added Ref. [52] appeared recently after the most parts of this paper had been c”
Gravitational wave constraints on the primordial black hole dominated early universe (2020, background): “The mass of the freshly formed PBH is proportional to the mass inside the horizon at the time of formation, namely [18]”
Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “BBHs events teach us about the population of BHs, which constrains their possible contribution to DM and their possible primordial origin (Sasaki et al., 2018).”
The exponential tail of inflationary fluctuations: consequences for primordial black holes (2019, background): “[30, 31] for reviews), since PBHs leave several imprints throughout the history of the universe: by injecting energy into their surrounding environment, by providing a source of gravitational lensing, by sourcing various dynamical effects, and by emitting gravitational waves [32–34].”
Primordial black holes from string inflation (2018, background): “However, more generically, the PBH mass function is broadly peaked, and so the fraction of the total dark matter density in PBHs looks like [3, 69]:”