Primordial black holes as a tool for constraining non-Gaussianity
By C. Byrnes, Edmund J. Copeland, A. Green. 2012
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Primordial Black Holes (PBH's) can form in the early Universe from thecollapse of large density fluctuations. Tight observational limits on theirabundance constrain the amplitude of the primordial fluctuations on very smallscales which can not otherwise be constrained, with PBH's only forming from theextremely rare large fluctuations. The number of PBH's formed is thereforesensitive to small changes in the shape of the tail of the fluctuationdistribution, which itself depends on the amount of non-Gaussianity present. Westudy, for the first time, how quadratic and cubic local non-Gaussianity ofarbitrary size (parameterised by f_nl and g_nl respectively) affects the PBHabundance and the resulting constraints on the amplitude of the fluctuations onvery small scales. Intriguingly we find that even non-linearity parameters oforder unity have a significant impact on the PBH abundance. The sign of thenon-Gaussianity is particularly important, with the constraint on the allowedfluctuation amplitude tightening by an order of magnitude as f_nl changes fromjust -0.5 to 0.5. We find that if PBH's are observed in the future, thenregardless of the amplitude of the fluctuations, non-negligible negative f_nlwould be ruled out. Finally we show that g_nl can have an even larger effect onthe number of PBH's formed than f_nl.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b338423a2065123f3dd5c220369139334cefb100
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
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Primordial black hole formation and abundance: contribution from the non-linear relation between the density and curvature perturbation (2019, methodology): “The most straight-forward method to calculate the abundance of PBHs from a nonGaussian distribution is to work instead with the Gaussian component of the perturbations [56, 57].”
- Steepest growth of the power spectrum and primordial black holes (2018, background): “fNL ∼ 1 was shown to have a significant impact on the power spectrum constraints in [77], while the higher-order non-linearity parameters and mode coupling are also important [78–80].”
- Gravitational wave signatures of inflationary models from Primordial Black Hole dark matter (2017, background): “For instance, the fraction β of causal regions collapsing onto primordial black holes is related to the power Pζ of primordial scalar perturbations by [56, 57]”
- Non-Gaussianity and the induced gravitational wave background (2021, background): “Note, however, that when considering the production of PBHs, non-Gaussianity has a significant impact on their abundance [105, 106].”
- Solar-mass primordial black holes explain NANOGrav hint of gravitational waves (2020, background): “Also, the inclusion of the intrinsic non-Gaussianity of the primordial curvature perturbations significantly affects fPBH [23, 133, 134].”
- Primordial black holes in non-Gaussian regimes (2013, methodology): “Because PBHs form in extremely rare large fluctuations in the tail of the probability distribution, one can use the large x limit of erfc(x) and show that [23]:”
- The exponential tail of inflationary fluctuations: consequences for primordial black holes (2019, background): “Non-Gaussianities may therefore play a crucial role in determining the abundance of PBHs [37–50] and, in this work, we provide a generic, non-perturbative framework to derive the tails of the PDFs of curvature perturbations.”
- Gauge field production in supergravity inflation: Local non-Gaussianity and primordial black holes (2012, background): “This model was studied in [40] and we follow that derivation (see also [38, 39]).”