Primordial black holes (PBHs) from the early Universe have been connected with the nature of dark matter and can significantly affect cosmological history. We show that coincidence dark radiation and density fluctuation gravitational wave signatures associated with evaporation of $lesssim 10^9$ g PBHs can be used to explore and discriminate different formation scenarios of spinning and non-spinning PBHs spanning orders of magnitude in mass-range, which is challenging to do otherwise.
We present a new realization of the resonant production of primordial black holes as well as gravitational waves in a two-stage inflation model consisting of a scalar field phi with an axion-monodromy-like periodic structure in the potential that governs the first stage and another field chi with a hilltop-like potential that dominates the second stage. The parametric resonance seeded by the periodic structure at the first stage amplifies the perturbations of both fields inside the Hubble radius. While the evolution of the background trajectory experiences a turn as the oscillatory barrier height increases, the amplified perturbations of chi remain as they are and contribute to the final curvature perturbation. It turns out that the primordial power spectrum displays a significant resonant peak on small scales, which can lead to an abundant production of primordial black holes. Furthermore, gravitational waves are also generated from the resonantly enhanced field perturbations during inflation, the amplitude of which may be constrained by future gravitational wave interferometers.
Recent observational constraints indicate that primordial black holes (PBHs) with the mass scale $sim 10^{-12}M_{odot}$ can explain most of dark matter in the Universe. To produce this kind of PBHs, we need an enhance in the primordial scalar curvature perturbations to the order of ${mathcal{O}(10^{-2})}$ at the scale $ k sim 10^{12}~rm Mpc^{-1}$. Here, we investigate the production of PBHs and induced gravitational waves (GWs) in the framework of textbf{$k$-inflation}. We solve numerically the Mukhanov-Sasaki equation to obtain the primordial scalar power spectrum. In addition, we estimate the PBHs abundance $f_{text{PBH}}^{text{peak}}$ as well as the energy density parameter $Omega_{rm GW,0}$ of induced GWs. Interestingly enough is that for a special set of model parameters, we estimate the mass scale and the abundance of PBHs as $sim{cal O}(10^{-13})M_{odot}$ and $f_{text{PBH}}^{text{peak}}=0.96$, respectively. This confirms that the mechanism of PBHs production in our inflationary model can justify most of dark matter. Furthermore, we evaluate the GWs energy density parameter and conclude that it behaves like a power-law function $Omega_{rm GW}sim (f/f_c)^n$ where in the infrared limit $fll f_{c}$, the power index reads $n=3-2/ln(f_c/f)$.
Primordial black hole (PBH) mergers have been proposed as an explanation for the gravitational wave events detected by the LIGO collaboration. Such PBHs may be formed in the early Universe as a result of the collapse of extremely rare high-sigma peaks of primordial fluctuations on small scales, as long as the amplitude of primordial perturbations on small scales is enhanced significantly relative to the amplitude of perturbations observed on large scales. One consequence of these small-scale perturbations is generation of stochastic gravitational waves that arise at second order in scalar perturbations, mostly before the formation of the PBHs. These induced gravitational waves have been shown, assuming gaussian initial conditions, to be comparable to the current limits from the European Pulsar Timing Array, severely restricting this scenario. We show, however, that models with enhanced fluctuation amplitudes typically involve non-gaussian initial conditions. With such initial conditions, the current limits from pulsar timing can be evaded. The amplitude of the induced gravitational-wave background can be larger or smaller than the stochastic gravitational-wave background from supermassive black hole binaries.
An observable stochastic background of gravitational waves is generated whenever primordial black holes are created in the early universe thanks to a small-scale enhancement of the curvature perturbation. We calculate the anisotropies and non-Gaussianity of such stochastic gravitational waves background which receive two contributions, the first at formation time and the second due to propagation effects. The former contribution can be generated if the distribution of the curvature perturbation is characterized by a local and scale-invariant shape of non-Gaussianity. Under such an assumption, we conclude that a sizeable magnitude of anisotropy and non-Gaussianity in the gravitational waves would suggest that primordial black holes may not comply the totality of the dark matter.
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are a viable candidate for dark matter if the PBH masses are in the currently unconstrained sublunar mass range. We revisit the possibility that PBHs were produced by nucleation of false vacuum bubbles during inflation. We show that this scenario can produce a population of PBHs that simultaneously accounts for all dark matter, explains the candidate event in Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) data, and contains both heavy black holes as observed by LIGO and very heavy seeds of supermassive black holes. We demonstrate with numerical studies that future observations of HSC, as well as other optical surveys, such as LSST, will be able to provide a definitive test for this generic PBH formation mechanism if it is the dominant source of dark matter.