Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures

By B. Carr, J. Silk. 2018

252 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Primordial black holes (PBHs) could provide the dark matter in various mass windows below $10^2 M_{\odot}$ and those of $30 M_{\odot}$ might explain the LIGO events. PBHs much larger than this might have important consequences even if they provide only a small fraction of the dark matter. In particular, they could generate cosmological structure either individually through through the `seed' effect or collectively through the `Poisson' effect, thereby alleviating some problems associated with the standard CDM scenario. If the PBHs all have a similar mass and make a small contribution to the dark matter, then the seed effect dominates on small scales, in which case PBHs could seed the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei or even galaxies themselves. If they have a similar mass and provide the dark matter, the Poisson effect dominates on all scales and the first bound clouds would form earlier than in the usual scenario, with interesting observational consequences. If the PBHs have an extended mass spectrum, which is more likely, they could fulfill all three roles - providing the dark matter, binding the first bound clouds and generating galaxies. In this case, the galactic mass function naturally has the observed form, with the galaxy mass being simply related to the black hole mass. The stochastic gravitational wave background from the PBHs in this scenario would extend continuously from the LIGO frequency to the LISA frequency, offering a potential goal for future surveys.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67ab218339bafbe6077c5b44bb100332261ed3aa

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Citations in the corpus

Analytic description of primordial black hole formation from scalar field fragmentation (2019, unknown): “[1–20]).”
The exponential tail of inflationary fluctuations: consequences for primordial black holes (2019, background): “PBHs may also play a role in the generation of large-scale structures [22, 29] and solve a number of problems currently encountered in astrophysics and cosmology (see e.”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “Reference [145]).”
Gravitational wave constraints on the primordial black hole dominated early universe (2020, background): “This kind of long-lived PBHs are attracting a lot of attention as potential candidates for explaining dark matter [7, 8], the binary black holes responsible for the LIGO/VIRGO gravitational waves (GW) detection [9–11], the seeds of supermassive black holes [12, 13], the microlensing events by planet”
Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “Recently, PBHs have attracted a lot of attention and have been studied extensively [4–9], since they can be the candidates for dark matter (DM) [10–16], the seeds for galaxy formation [17–20], and even the sources of LIGO/VIRGO detection [21, 22], depending on their mass and abundance, which can be ”
A Brief Review on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter (2021, background): “Furthermore, PBHs could constitute the seeds for super massive black holes (SMBHs), present in the nuclei of most galaxies, with masses ranging from 105 M⊙ to 1010 M⊙, and already existing at redshifts z > 6 (Carr and Silk, 2018).”
Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “despite ejections caused by anisotropic emission of GWs [128], or formation channels with much more massive seeds related to topological defects or large-curvature perturbations in the early Universe [54, 69] (see also Section 3.”
Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “There are also problems with the standard CDM scenario which Silk claims can be resolved with PBHs in the intermediate mass range [170].”