Primordial Black Holes from Polynomial Potentials in Single Field Inflation
By M. Hertzberg, Masaki Yamada. 2017
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Within canonical single field inflation models, we provide a method to reverse engineer and reconstruct the inflaton potential from a given power spectrum. This is not only a useful tool to find a potential from observational constraints, but also gives insight into how to generate a large amplitude spike in density perturbations, especially those that may lead to primordial black holes (PBHs). In accord with other works, we find that the usual slow-roll conditions need to be violated in order to generate a significant spike in the spectrum, entering the so-called ultra-slow-roll regime. We find that a way to achieve a very large amplitude spike in single field models is for the classical roll of the inflaton to over-shoot a local minimum during inflation. We provide an example of a quintic potential that implements this idea and leads to the observed spectral index, observed amplitude of fluctuations on large scales, significant PBH formation on small scales, and is compatible with other observational constraints. We quantify how much fine-tuning is required to achieve this in a family of random polynomial potentials, which may be useful to estimate the probability of PBH formation in the string landscape.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a770691e0c52ecb939dbd846ec6be9ac5466e4e4
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Citations in the corpus
- Primordial black holes from string inflation (2018, background): “Despite the fact that dark matter as PBHs formed during single-field inflation might seem a very appealing idea, its explicit realisation in concrete models has turned out to be rather complicated since the inflationary potential has to possess enough tuning freedom to allow for such dynamics [17].”
- Steepest growth of the power spectrum and primordial black holes (2018, background): “at m = 6 for a monomial basis: the typical order to which we need to know the potential in order to have a handle on the η problem (see for instance, the treatment in [32]).”