Inflationary primordial black holes for the LIGO gravitational wave events and pulsar timing array experiments

By Keisuke Inomata, M. Kawasaki, K. Mukaida, Y. Tada, T. Yanagida. 2016

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are one of the candidates to explain the gravitational wave (GW) signals observed by the LIGO detectors. Among several phenomena in the early Universe, cosmic inflation is a major example to generate PBHs from large primordial density perturbations. In this paper, we discuss the possibility to interpret the observed GW events as mergers of PBHs which are produced by cosmic inflation. The primordial curvature perturbation should be large enough to produce a sizable amount of PBHs and thus we have several other probes to test this scenario. We point out that the current pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments already put severe constraints on GWs generated via the second-order effects, and that the observation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) puts severe restriction on its $\mu$ distortion. In particular, it is found that the scalar power spectrum should have a very sharp peak at $k \sim 10^{6}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ to fulfill the required abundance of PBHs while evading constraints from the PTA experiments together with the $\mu$ distortion. We propose a mechanism which can realize such a sharp peak. In the future, simple inflation models that generate PBHs via almost Gaussian fluctuations could be probed/excluded.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c02265dc99a877f59133574c5c8f8521adb0e41

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational wave signatures of inflationary models from Primordial Black Hole dark matter (2017, background): “The two works [36, 37] study the SGWB sourced at reentry at PTA scales emerging from different inflationary models, assuming Gaussian statistics of the curvature perturbations.”
Primordial black holes and second order gravitational waves from ultra-slow-roll inflation (2017, background): “In fact, almost all the number of e-folds comes from the contribution around φinfl, then the power spectrum gets big boost in the small scales, this will cause big μ distortion [50, 64] because the μ distortion is [64, 65] μac ≈ ∫ ∞”
Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “On the other hand, those large curvature perturbations, as source of the tensor perturbations, would result in an isotropic stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background observable today [23–43].”
Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures (2018, background): “Inomata et al. (2017) propose a scenario which combines a broad mass function at low m (to explain the dark matter) with a sharp one at high m (to explain the LIGO events).”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…& Hawking 1974; Bird et al. 2016; Carr et al. 2016; Inayoshi et al. 2016; Sasaki et al. 2016; Ali-Haïmoud et al. 2017; Clesse & García-Bellido 2017; Inomata et al. 2017; Ando et al. 2018; Chen & Huang 2018), where their mass spectrum is typically proposed as having power-law behavior, but spanning…”
Primordial Black Holes from Polynomial Potentials in Single Field Inflation (2017, unknown): “[26] assuming a delta-function power spectrum.”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[90] propose a scenario which combines a broad mass function at low M (to explain the dark matter) with a sharp one at high mass (to explain the LIGO events).”
The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation (2017, background): “Alternatively, GW150914 and GW170104 might be the result of primordial BHs born from gravitational collapse in the early Universe (e.g. Bird et al. 2016; Carr et al. 2016; Inomata et al. 2017).”
Semianalytic calculation of gravitational wave spectrum nonlinearly induced from primordial curvature perturbations (2018, methodology): “[38] is reproduced in the small k̃ limit where their approximation is valid.”