Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the mass range ∼1017–1023 g are currently unconstrained, and can constitute the full dark matter (DM) density of the universe. Motivated by this, in the current work, we aim to relate the existence of PBHs in the said mass range to the production of observable gravitational waves (GWs) in the upcoming GW detectors. We follow a relatively model-independent approach assuming that the PBHs took birth in a radiation dominated era from enhanced primordial curvature perturbation at small scales produced by inflation. We show that the constraints from cosmic microwave background and BAO data allow for the possibility of PBHs being the whole of DM density of the universe. Finally, we derive the GW spectrum induced by the enhanced curvature perturbations and show that they are detectable in the future GW detectors like eLISA, LISA, BBO, and DECIGO. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Read full abstract