Testing primordial black holes as dark matter with LISA

By N. Bartolo, V. D. Luca, G. Franciolini, Marco Peloso, Davide Racco, A. Riotto. Physical Review D, 2018

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The idea that primordial black holes (PBHs) can comprise most of the dark matter of the universe has recently reacquired a lot of momentum. Observational constraints, however, rule out this possibility for most of the PBH masses, with a notable exception around $10^{-12} M_\odot$. These light PBHs may be originated when a sizeable comoving curvature perturbation generated during inflation re-enters the horizon during the radiation phase. During such a stage, it is unavoidable that gravitational waves (GWs) are generated. Since their source is quadratic in the curvature perturbations, these GWs are generated fully non-Gaussian. Their frequency today is about the mHz, which is exactly the range where the LISA mission has the maximum of its sensitivity. This is certainly an impressive coincidence. We show that this scenario of PBHs as dark matter can be tested by LISA by measuring the GW two-point correlator. On the other hand, we show that the short observation time (as compared to the age of the universe) and propagation effects of the GWs across the perturbed universe from the production point to the LISA detector suppress the bispectrum to an unobservable level. This suppression is completely general and not specific to our model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e73a201fa7b6d24ad576df71ec0d3c7f966241f0

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Citations in the corpus

Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[278, 279] have studied whether LISA will be able to detect not only the gravitational-wave (GW) power spectrum but also the non-Gaussian three-point GW correlator (i.”
Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “Recently, PBHs have attracted a lot of attention and have been studied extensively [4–9], since they can be the candidates for dark matter (DM) [10–16], the seeds for galaxy formation [17–20], and even the sources of LIGO/VIRGO detection [21, 22], depending on their mass and abundance, which can be ”
The ineludible non-Gaussianity of the primordial black hole abundance (2019, background): “For instance, for PBH masses around the interesting value of 10−12M [38, 39], one would get from the gaussian mass fraction (1.”
Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “[122–125] for examples of studies focussing on SGWBs detectable at LISA frequencies.”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “to obtain a sizable primordial BH abundance of some specific given mass, the height of the bump could be sufficiently high to produce a noticeable amount of GWs [97–99].”
Generating PBHs and small-scale GWs in two-field models of inflation (2020, background): “pectively, that can constitute up to the totality of the observed CDM in our Universe. A detection of such a signal from future space based intereferometers would be a strong hint of this possibility [49,105]. Finally, in the ET case, we show how our mechanism can operate even at higher frequencies.”
Probing the gravitational wave background from cosmic strings with LISA (2019, background): “[202, 203] have recently pointed out that propagation effects of GWs across a perturbed universe like ours — from the generation point to the LISA detector — will suppress the bispectrum to un-observable levels.”