Primordial black hole formation in the radiative era: investigation of the critical nature of the collapse

By I. Musco, J. Miller, A. Polnarev. 2008

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Following on after two previous papers discussing the formation of primordial black holes in the early universe, we present here results from an in-depth investigation of the extent to which primordial black hole formation in the radiative era can be considered as an example of the critical collapse phenomenon. We focus on initial supra-horizon-scale perturbations of a type which could have come from inflation, with only a growing component and no decaying component. In order to study perturbations with amplitudes extremely close to the supposed critical limit, we have modified our previous computer code with the introduction of an adaptive mesh refinement scheme. This has allowed us to follow black hole formation from perturbations whose amplitudes are up to eight orders of magnitude closer to the threshold than we could do before. We find that scaling-law behaviour continues down to the smallest black hole masses that we are able to follow and we see no evidence of shock production such as has been reported in some previous studies and which led there to a breaking of the scaling-law behaviour at small black hole masses. We attribute this difference to the different initial conditions used. In addition to the scaling law, we also present other features of the results which are characteristic of critical collapse in this context.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d78cb383650053308de04e04adaefd7b61c75777

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. B. Carr
2. Florian Kuhnel
3. K. Kohri
4. C. Byrnes
5. T. Terada
6. S. Young
7. I. Musco
8. R. Cai

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. B. Carr
2. Florian Kuhnel
3. K. Kohri
4. C. Byrnes
5. S. Young
6. I. Musco
7. T. Terada
8. Marco Peloso

Citations in the corpus

• Solar-mass primordial black holes explain NANOGrav hint of gravitational waves (2020, background): “where we have assumed that the primordial curvature perturbations have the Gaussian statistics, δc is the critical value of the coarse-grained density perturbations that produces a PBH [58–64], for which we take δc = 0.”
• Primordial black hole formation and abundance: contribution from the non-linear relation between the density and curvature perturbation (2019, result): “As has been shown in previous works [20, 21, 31, 33, 39] the mass spectrum of PBHs follows the critical collapse, characterized by a scaling law relation”
• PRIMORDIAL BLACK HOLE FORMATION IN THE MATTER-DOMINATED PHASE OF THE UNIVERSE (2016, background): “The results of numerical relativity simulations in spherical symmetry give the threshold d 0.42 0.50c˜ – (Shibata & Sasaki 1999; Musco et al. 2005; Polnarev & Musco 2007; Musco et al. 2009; Musco & Miller 2013; Harada et al. 2015).”
• Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “Even in the limiting case of BH formation due to a sharp peak in the primordial power spectrum, these primordial BHs would have a relatively broad distribution, due to effects related to the critical collapse [46,47].”
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[58] Ilia Musco, John Miller, and Alexander Polnarev, “Primordial black hole formation in the radiative era: Investigation of the critical nature of the collapse,” Class.”
• Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “To get more accurate results, one needs to consider more details of PBH formation, such as the critical collapse [81–86], and the nonlinearity of the transfer function [57].”