No Arabic abstract
Primordial black holes (PBHs) have long been suggested as a candidate for making up some or all of the dark matter in the Universe. Most of the theoretically possible mass range for PBH dark matter has been ruled out with various null observations of expected signatures of their interaction with standard astrophysical objects. However, current constraints are significantly less robust in the 20 M_sun < M_PBH < 100 M_sun mass window, which has received much attention recently, following the detection of merging black holes with estimated masses of ~30 M_sun by LIGO and the suggestion that these could be black holes formed in the early Universe. We consider the potential of advanced LIGO (aLIGO) operating at design sensitivity to probe this mass range by looking for peaks in the mass spectrum of detected events. To quantify the background, which is due to black holes that are formed from dying stars, we model the shape of the stellar-black-hole mass function and calibrate its amplitude to match the O1 results. Adopting very conservative assumptions about the PBH and stellar-black-hole merger rates, we show that ~5 years of aLIGO data can be used to detect a contribution of >20 M_sun PBHs to dark matter down to f_PBH<0.5 at >99.9% confidence level. Combined with other probes that already suggest tension with f_PBH=1, the obtainable independent limits from aLIGO will thus enable a firm test of the scenario that PBHs make up all of dark matter.
The possibility that primordial black holes (PBHs) represent all of the dark matter (DM) in the Universe and explain the coalescences of binary black holes detected by LIGO/Virgo has attracted a lot of attention. PBHs are generated by the enhancement of scalar perturbations which inevitably produce the induced gravitational waves (GWs). We calculate the induced GWs up to the third-order correction which not only enhances the amplitude of induced GWs, but also extends the cutoff frequency from $2k_*$ to $3k_*$. Such effects of the third-order correction lead to an around $10%$ increase of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for both LISA and pulsar timing array (PTA) observations, and significantly widen the mass range of PBHs in the stellar mass window accompanying detectable induced GWs for PTA observations including IPTA, FAST and SKA. On the other hand, the null detections of the induced GWs by LISA and PTA experiments will exclude the possibility that all of the DM is comprised of PBHs and the GW events detected by LIGO/Virgo are generated by PBHs.
We study the prospects of future gravitational wave (GW) detectors in probing primordial black hole (PBH) binaries. We show that across a broad mass range from $10^{-5}M_odot$ to $10^7M_odot$, future GW interferometers provide a potential probe of the PBH abundance that is more sensitive than any currently existing experiment. In particular, we find that galactic PBH binaries with masses as low as $10^{-5}M_odot$ may be probed with ET, AEDGE and LISA by searching for nearly monochromatic continuous GW signals. Such searches could independently test the PBH interpretation of the ultrashort microlensing events observed by OGLE. We also consider the possibility of observing GWs from asteroid mass PBH binaries through graviton-photon conversion.
The black hole merging rates inferred after the gravitational-wave detection by Advanced LIGO/VIRGO and the relatively high mass of the progenitors are consistent with models of dark matter made of massive primordial black holes (PBH). PBH binaries emit gravitational waves in a broad range of frequencies that will be probed by future space interferometers (LISA) and pulsar timing arrays (PTA). The amplitude of the stochastic gravitational-wave background expected for PBH dark matter is calculated taking into account various effects such as initial eccentricity of binaries, PBH velocities, mass distribution and clustering. It allows a detection by the LISA space interferometer, and possibly by the PTA of the SKA radio-telescope. Interestingly, one can distinguish this background from the one of non-primordial massive binaries through a specific frequency dependence, resulting from the maximal impact parameter of binaries formed by PBH capture, depending on the PBH velocity distribution and their clustering properties. Moreover, we find that the gravitational wave spectrum is boosted by the width of PBH mass distribution, compared with that of the monochromatic spectrum. The current PTA constraints already rule out broad-mass PBH models covering more than three decades of masses, but evading the microlensing and CMB constraints due to clustering.
Dark matter coupled solely gravitationally can be produced through the decay of primordial black holes in the early universe. If the dark matter is lighter than the initial black hole temperature, it could be warm enough to be subject to structure formation constraints. In this paper we perform a more precise determination of these constraints. We first evaluate the dark matter phase-space distribution, without relying on the instantaneous decay approximation. We then interface this phase-space distribution with the Boltzmann code CLASS to extract the corresponding matter power spectrum, which we find to match closely those of warm dark matter models, albeit with a different dark matter mass. This mapping allows us to extract constraints from Lyman-$alpha$ data without the need to perform hydrodynamical simulations. We robustly rule out the possibility, consistent with previous analytic estimates, of primordial black holes having come to dominate the energy density of the universe and simultaneously given rise to all the DM through their decay. Consequences and implications for dark radiation and leptogenesis are also briefly discussed.
We investigate a possibility of primordial black hole (PBH) formation with a hierarchical mass spectrum in multiple phases of inflation. As an example, we find that one can simultaneously realize a mass spectrum which has recently attracted a lot of attention: stellar-mass PBHs ($simmathcal{O}(10)M_odot$) as a possible source of binary black holes detected by LIGO/Virgo collaboration, asteroid-mass ($simmathcal{O}(10^{-12})M_odot$) as a main component of dark matter, and earth-mass ($simmathcal{O}(10^{-5})M_odot$) as a source of ultrashort-timescale events in Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment microlensing data. The recent refined de Sitter swampland conjecture may support such a multi-phase inflationary scenario with hierarchical mass PBHs as a transition signal of each inflationary phase.