Primordial Black Holes

Abstract

Primordial Black Holes (PBH) can form after inflation due to high peaks in the primordial curvature power spectrum that collapse gravitationally during the radiation era, to form clusters of black holes that merge and increase in mass after recombination, generating today a broad mass-spectrum of black holes with masses ranging from 0.01 to $10^3~M_\odot$. These PBH could act as seeds for galaxies and quick-start structure formation, initiating reionization, forming galaxies at redshift $z>10$ and clusters at $z>1$. They may also be the seeds on which SMBH and IMBH form, by accreting gas onto them and forming the centers of galaxies and quasars at high redshift. They form at rest with zero spin and have negligible cross-section with ordinary matter. If there are enough of these PBH, they could constitute the bulk of the Dark Matter today. Such PBH could be responsible for the observed fluctuations in the CIB and X-ray backgrounds. PBH could be directly detected by the gravitational waves emitted when they merge to form more massive black holes, as recently reported by LIGO. Their continuous merging since recombination could have generated a stochastic background of gravitational waves that could eventually be detected by LIGO, LISA and PTA. PBH may actually be responsible for the unidentified point sources seen by Fermi, Magic and Chandra. Furthermore, the ejection of stars from shallow potential wells like those of Dwarf Spheroidals (DSph), via the gravitational slingshot effect, could be due to PBH, thus alleviating the substructure and too-big-to-fail problems of standard collisionless CDM. Their mass distribution peaks at a few $M_\odot$ today, and could therefore be detected also with long-duration microlensing events, as well as by the anomalous motion of stars in the field of GAIA. Their presence as CDM in the Universe could be seen in the time-dilation of strong-lensing images of quasars. The hierarchical large-scale structure pattern of PBH as DM does not differ from that of ordinary CDM, but the small-scale structure could be very different at scales below $10^4~M_\odot$.