Cosmic microwave background limits on accreting primordial black holes

By Y. Ali-Haimoud, M. Kamionkowski. 2016

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interest in the idea that primordial black holes (PBHs) might comprise some or all of the dark matter has recently been rekindled following LIGO’s first direct detection of a binary-black-hole merger. Here we revisit the effect of accreting PBHs on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) frequency spectrum and the angular temperature and polarization power spectra. We compute the accretion rate and luminosity of PBHs, accounting for their suppression by Compton drag and Compton cooling by CMB photons. We estimate the gas temperature near the Schwarzschild radius and, hence, the free-free luminosity, accounting for the cooling resulting from collisional ionization when the background gas is mostly neutral. We account approximately for the velocities of PBHs with respect to the background gas. We provide a simple analytic estimate of the efficiency of energy deposition in the plasma. We find that the spectral distortions generated by accreting PBHs are too small to be detected by FIRAS, as well as by future experiments now being considered. We analyze Planck CMB temperature and polarization data and find, under our most conservative hypotheses, and at the order-of-magnitude level, that they rule out PBHs with masses ≳102 M⊙ as the dominant component of dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c01eded3044fcdb89360b5f9ea3ed1d13f6565fa

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Citations in the corpus

Femtolensing by dark matter revisited (2018, methodology): “As the impact parameter grows, the amplitude of the oscillations falls off more slowly towards higher frequency than for a point-like lens, increasing the lensing probability for UCMHs compared to PBHs. Comparing figures 1 and 3, we observe that the interference fringes for UCMHs are shifted to high”
Dark matter models and direct detection (2019, background): “Massive PBHs can accrete matter in the early universe, leading to emission of ionizing radiation which is strongly constrained by CMB observations [25].”
Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, methodology): “5 show the constraints from microlensing results from EROS [76], OGLE [77], and MACHO [78], lensing of type Ia supernovae (SNe) [79], survival of a stars in dwarf galaxies (Seg I and Eri II) [80, 81], distribution of wide binaries (WB) [82], Lyman-α forest data [83, 84] and limits on accretion (Plan”
A Brief Review on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter (2021, background): “where the parameter λ is the dimensionless accretion rate and depends on the equation of state, but it is order ∼ 1 for the cases of interest (Ali-Haïmoud and Kamionkowski, 2017).”
Primordial black hole dark matter from single field inflation (2017, methodology): “For the (orange) constraints from CMB anisotropies we also show conservative (solid) and stronger (dashed) bounds (see figure 14 from [26]).”
Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “This limits the total mass density in PBHs in the 10(5)–10(6) M⊙ range to a small fraction of the DM density [11, 204].”
Gravitational wave signatures of inflationary models from Primordial Black Hole dark matter (2017, methodology): “Moreover, the revision of the CMB bounds on PBH in this mass range [55], and uncertainties on the Eridanus II limits [51] allow for the possibility that a distribution of PBH masses in this range could constitute all of the dark matter in the Universe.”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[202] Yacine Ali-Häımoud and Marc Kamionkowski, “Cosmic microwave background limits on accreting primordial black holes,” Phys.”
Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “M 31 K ep le r E R O S1& 2 Ic ar us Q ua sa r μle ns in g M A C H O M ul tip le ra di o im ag es St ar de st ru ct io n Se gu e 1 /E ri da nu s II W id e bi na ry /G lo bu la r cl us te r D yn am ic al fr ic tio n /D is k he at in g G al ac tic X -r ay s C M B an is ot ro py (d is k/ sp h. ac cr et ”