Primordial black holes from the preheating instability in single-field inflation

Abstract

After the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around a local minimum of its potential and decays into ordinary matter. These oscillations trigger a resonant instability for cosmological perturbations with wavelengths that exit the Hubble radius close to the end of inflation. In this paper, we study the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) at these enhanced scales. We find that the production mechanism can be so efficient that PBHs subsequently dominate the content of the universe and reheating proceeds from their evaporation. Observational constraints on the PBH abundance also restrict the duration of the resonant instability phase, leading to tight limits on the reheating temperature that we derive. We conclude that the production of PBHs during reheating is a generic and inevitable property of the simplest inflationary single-field models, and does not require any fine tuning of the inflationary potential.