Primordial black holes with an accurate QCD equation of state
By C. Byrnes, M. Hindmarsh, S. Young, M. Hawkins. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2018
194 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Making use of definitive new lattice computations of the Standard Model thermodynamics during the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) phase transition, we calculate the enhancement in the mass distribution of primordial black holes (PBHs) due to the softening of the equation of state. We find that the enhancement peaks at approximately 0.7M⊙, with the formation rate increasing by at least two orders of magnitude due to the softening of the equation of state at this time, with a range of approximately 0.3M⊙<M<1.4M⊙ at full width half-maximum. PBH formation is increased by a smaller amount for PBHs with masses spanning a large range, 10−3M⊙<MPBH<103M⊙, which includes the masses of the BHs that LIGO detected. The most significant source of uncertainty in the number of PBHs formed is now due to unknowns in the formation process, rather than from the phase transition. A near scale-invariant density power spectrum tuned to generate a population with mass and merger rate consistent with that detected by LIGO should also produce a much larger energy density of PBHs with solar mass. The existence of BHs below the Chandresekhar mass limit would be a smoking gun for a primordial origin and they could arguably constitute a significant fraction of the cold dark matter density. They also pose a challenge to inflationary model building which seek to produce the LIGO BHs without overproducing lighter PBHs.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c281def96edc0eb113d50a7f8c710d4b3c01c3fb
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Citations in the corpus
- Solar-mass primordial black holes explain NANOGrav hint of gravitational waves (2020, background): “[37, 140, 141] for its enhancement effect on the PBH abundance fPBH for a given scalar amplitude As.”
- Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “Primordial BHs could also span numerous decades of the mass spectrum(Georg & Watson 2017), but their number density in either mass gap is dependent on the behavior of fluctuations in the early universe(Byrnes et al. 2018).”
- Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “The boost in primordial BH formation at the time of the QCD transition will induce a peak at the solar mass scale in any primordial BH model with an extended mass function (Byrnes et al. 2018; Carr et al. 2021).”
- Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[30] have discussed how this softening – when combined with critical phenomena and the exponential sensitivity of β(M)”
- Steepest growth of the power spectrum and primordial black holes (2018, background): “J C A P 0 6 ( 2 0 1 9 ) 0 2 8 in the equation of state around the time of the QCD transition [65].”
- Primordial black hole formation and abundance: contribution from the non-linear relation between the density and curvature perturbation (2019, background): “The total energy fraction of the universe contained within PBHs today can be approximated by integrating over all times at which PBHs form, parameterised here by the horizon mass (more details of this integral can be found in [59])”
- Search for sub-solar mass ultracompact binaries in Advanced LIGO's second observing run (2019, background): “The size and abundance of any such PBHs depends on the spectrum of primordial perturbations and on the equation of state of the early Universe [24 – 27].”