Gravitational waves from primordial black hole mergers

By M. Raidal, V. Vaskonen, H. Veermae. 2017

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the production of primordial black hole (PBH) binaries and the resulting merger rate, accounting for an extended PBH mass function and the possibility of a clustered spatial distribution. Under the hypothesis that the gravitational wave events observed by LIGO were caused by PBH mergers, we show that it is possible to satisfy all present constraints on the PBH abundance, and find the viable parameter range for the lognormal PBH mass function. The non-observation of a gravitational wave background allows us to derive constraints on the fraction of dark matter in PBHs, which are stronger than any other current constraint in the PBH mass range 0.5−30M⊙. We show that the predicted gravitational wave background can be observed by the coming runs of LIGO, and its non-observation would indicate that the observed events are not of primordial origin. As the PBH mergers convert matter into radiation, they may have interesting cosmological implications, for example in the context of relieving the tension between high and low redshift measurements of the Hubble constant. However, we find that these effects are suppressed as, after recombination, no more that 1% of dark matter can be converted into gravitational waves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d9157d66ffad358e9f94c16234323d75bab5427

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Florian Kuhnel
2. B. Carr
3. A. Riotto
4. G. Franciolini
5. V. D. Luca
6. M. Raidal
7. P. Pani
8. V. Vaskonen

Citations in the corpus

• Gravitational waves from a universe filled with primordial black holes (2020, background): “Third, gravitational waves are expected to be emitted by PBHs mergers [14, 34–38].”
• Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “[166], even the early LIGO results gave strong limits in the range 0.”
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, methodology): “[47], even the early LIGO results gave strong limits in the range 0.”
• Revisiting constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2019, background): “Recent discoveries of binary black hole mergers with ∼ 10M [32–35] have posed challenges to stellar evolution theories, reviving the enthusiasm about PBHs as DM in that mass range [36–43].”