Could supermassive black holes be quintessential primordial black holes

By R. Bean, João Magueijo. 2002

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is growing observational evidence for a population of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic bulges. We examine in detail the conditions under which these black holes must have originated from primordial black holes (PBHs). We consider the merging and accretion history experienced by SMBHs to find that, whereas it is possible that they were formed by purely astrophysical processes, this is unlikely and most probably a populations of primordial progenitors is necessary. We identify the mass distribution and comoving density of this population and then propose a cosmological scenario producing PBHs with the right properties. Although this is not essential we consider PBHs produced at the end of a period of inflation with a blue spectrum of fluctuations. We constrain the value of the spectral tilt in order to obtain the required PBH comoving density. We then assume that PBHs grow by accreting quintessence showing that their mass scales like the horizon mass while the quintessence field itself is scaling. We find that if scaling is broken just before nucleosynthesis (as is the case with some attractive non-minimally coupled models) we obtain the appropriate PBH mass distribution. Hawking evaporation is negligible in most cases, but we also discuss situations in which the interplay of accretion and evaporation is relevant.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93479128f4b29c5426b0374489a080f0750096cb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Carr
2. J. Silk
3. J. Ezquiaga
4. Juan García-Bellido
5. Florian Kuhnel
6. R. Cai
7. Misao Sasaki
8. V. Vennin

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. B. Carr
2. J. Silk
3. Juan García-Bellido
4. J. Ezquiaga
5. V. Vennin
6. R. Cai
7. Misao Sasaki
8. N. Afshordi

Citations in the corpus

• Structure formation in inhomogeneous dark energy models (2004, background): “Bean & Magueijo (2002) suggested that the quintessence field could have an important impact in the highly non-linear regime.”
• The exponential tail of inflationary fluctuations: consequences for primordial black holes (2019, background): “Even if sparsely distributed, PBHs are of particular cosmological relevance as they could provide seeds for supermassive black-holes in galactic nuclei [20–22], and comprise a large fraction of the dark matter [23, 24].”
• Primordial black holes from a tiny bump/dip in the inflaton potential (2019, background): “This could be particularly important for heavy PBHs which might seed the formation of supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies and AGN’s [12, 13, 90].”
• Gravitational waves from a universe filled with primordial black holes (2020, background): “They may indeed constitute part or all of the dark matter [3], they may explain the generation of large-scale structures through Poisson fluctuations [4, 5], they may provide seeds for supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei [6, 7], and they may also account for the progenitors of the black-hole”
• Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures (2018, background): “Indeed, this AGN-induced softening occurs even in massive galaxies (Peirani et al. 2018).”
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: The Power Spectrum and Evaporation of Early Structures (2003, background): “However, Bean & Magueijo (2002) speculate that the accretion of quintessence (i.e., a scalar field) into the PBHs could lead to the scaling of the PBH mass with MH .”
• Analytic description of primordial black hole formation from scalar field fragmentation (2019, background): “[24–31]), formation of supermassive black holes [25, 32, 33] as well as r-process nucleosynthesis [34], gamma-ray bursts and microquasars [35] from compact star disruptions.”
• 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 ”