Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments

By B. Carr, Florian Kuhnel. Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, 2020

1,149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the dark matter is usually assumed to be made up of some form of elementary particle, primordial black holes (PBHs) could also provide some of it. However, various constraints restrict the possible mass windows to 1016–1017 g, 1020–1024 g, and 10–103 M⊙. The last possibility is contentious but of special interest in view of the recent detection of black hole mergers by LIGO/Virgo. PBHs might have important consequences and resolve various cosmological conundra even if they account for only a small fraction of the dark matter density. In particular, those larger than 103 M⊙ could generate cosmological structures through the seed or Poisson effect, thereby alleviating some problems associated with the standard cold dark matter scenario, and sufficiently large PBHs might provide seeds for the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei. More exotically, the Planck-mass relics of PBH evaporations or stupendously large black holes bigger than 1012 M⊙ could provide an interesting dark component.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a35e08bb1a16b4e0e7c895cdd91377d5221c0c0b

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. Michela Mapelli
2. N. Giacobbo
3. D. Holz
4. Mario Spera
5. Florian Kuhnel
6. B. Carr
7. Ilya Mandel
8. Maya Fishbach

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Florian Kuhnel
2. B. Carr
3. Juan García-Bellido
4. Misao Sasaki
5. A. Kehagias
6. J. Silk
7. Michela Mapelli
8. J. Ezquiaga

Citations in the corpus

• Primordial black holes and second order gravitational waves from ultra-slow-roll inflation (2017, background): “For the details of the observational constraints, please refer to [16] and references therein.”
• Primordial black holes from string inflation (2018, background): “(2)For PBH formation in multi-field inflationary models see [1, 11, 12].”
• Analytic description of primordial black hole formation from scalar field fragmentation (2019, neutral): “[1–20]).”
• Primordial black holes from α-attractors (2018, background): “Recently it has been claimed that the CMB bounds on massive PBH may be relaxed due to uncertainties in the modeling of the relevant physical processes [6, 7, 103].”
• Revisiting constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2019, background): “[107]), these bounds depend on the globular clusters being formed in early dark matter halos and hence containing substantial non-baryonic dark matter today – a scenario that is possible but by no means established.”
• Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures (2018, background): “It is therefore representative of a large class of inflationary scenarios, including the axion-curvaton and running-mass infation models considered by Carr et al. (2016).”
• BlackHawk: a public code for calculating the Hawking evaporation spectra of any black hole distribution (2019, background): “With the detection of gravitational waves from mergers of binary BHs [1–3], direct observation of the Milky Way supermassive central BH [4], and the cosmological and gravitational questions related to primordial BHs (see for example [5–8]), these compact objects are currently under intense scrutiny.”