Light black holes could have formed in the very early universe through the collapse of large primordial density fluctuations. These primordial black holes (PBHs), if light enough, would have evaporated by now because of the emission of Hawking radiation; thus they could not represent a sizable fraction of dark matter today. However, they could have left imprints in the early cosmological epochs. We will discuss the impact of massless graviton emission by (rotating) PBHs before the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and conclude that this contribution to dark radiation is constrained by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) (with the future CMB Stage 4) and BBN in the lighter portion of the PBH mass range, under the hypothesis that they dominated the energy density of the universe.
We argue that primordial dark matter halos could be generated during radiation domination by long range attractive forces stronger than gravity. In this paper we derive the conditions under which these structures could dominate the dark matter content of the Universe while passing microlensing constraints and cosmic microwave background energy injection bounds. The dark matter particles would be clumped in objects in the solar mass range with typical sizes of the order of the solar system. Consequences for direct dark matter searches are important.
We derive the strongest constraint on the fraction of dark matter that can be composed of low mass primordial black holes by using the observation of the Galactic Center 511 keV gamma-ray line. Primordial black holes of masses $\lesssim$ 10$^{15}$ kg will evaporate to produce $e^\pm$ pairs. The positrons will lose energy in the Galactic Center, become non-relativistic, and then annihilate with the ambient electrons. We derive robust and conservative bounds by assuming that the rate of positron injection via primordial black hole evaporation is less than what is required to explain the SPI/ INT…
Models of Co-Decaying dark matter lead to an early matter dominated epoch -- prior to BBN -- which results in an enhancement of the growth of dark matter substructure. If these primordial structures collapse further they can form primordial black holes providing an additional dark matter candidate. We derive the mass fraction in these black holes (which is not monochromatic) and consider observational constraints on how much of the dark matter could be comprised in these relics. We find that in many cases they can be a significant fraction of the dark matter. Interestingly, the masses of these…
We investigate the production of primordial black holes and their contribution to the presently observed dark matter in a dilaton two-field extension of Starobinsky's quadratic $f(R)$ model of inflation. The model features a multi-field amplification mechanism which leads to the generation of a sharp peak in the inflationary power spectrum at small wavelengths responsible for the production of primordial black holes. This mechanism is significantly different from single-field models and requires a stochastic treatment during an intermediate phase of the inflationary dynamics. We find that the …
Primordial black holes are produced in a minimal UV extension to the Higgs inflation with an included $R^2$ term. We show that for parameters consistent with Standard Model measurements and Planck observation results lead to $M_{\rm PBH} \in (10^{-16}, 10^{-15}) M_\odot$ primordial black holes with significant abundance, which may consist the majority of dark matter.
Combining constraints from microlensing and Lyman-$α$ forest, we provide a simple argument to show that large spatial clustering of stellar-mass primordial black holes at the time of formation, such as the one induced by the presence of large non-Gaussianities, is ruled out. Therefore, it is not possible to evade existing constraints preventing stellar-mass primordial black holes to be a dominant constituent of the dark matter by boosting their initial clustering.
We revisit constraints on small-scale primordial power from annihilation signals from dark matter minihalos. Using gamma rays and neutrinos from extragalactic minihalos and assuming the delta-function primordial spectrum, we show the dependence of the constraints on annihilation modes, the mass of dark matter, and the annihilation cross section. We report both conservative constraints by assuming minihalos are fully destructed when becoming part of halos originating from the standard almost-scale invariant primordial spectrum, and optimistic constraints by neglecting destruction.
Primordial black holes and secondary gravitational waves can be used to probe the small scale physics at very early time. For secondary gravitational waves produced after the horizon reentry, we derive an analytical formula for the time integral of the source and analytical behavior of the time dependence of the energy density of induced gravitational waves is obtained. By proposing a piecewise power law parametrization for the power spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations, we use the observational constraints on primordial black hole dark matter to obtain an upper bound on the power sp…
We propose an extension of the scalaron-Higgs model by a non-minimal coupling of the Standard Model Higgs boson to the quadratic Ricci scalar resulting in a Higgs-dependent scalaron mass. The model predicts a successful stage of effective single-field Starobinsky inflation. It features a multi-field amplification mechanism leading to a peak in the inflationary power spectrum at small wavelengths which enhances the production of primordial black holes. The extended scalaron-Higgs model unifies inflationary cosmology with elementary particle physics and explains the origin of cold dark matter in…
Light, asteroid-mass primordial black holes, with lifetimes in the range between hundreds to several millions times the age of the universe, are well-motivated candidates for the cosmological dark matter. Using archival COMPTEL data, we improve over current constraints on the allowed parameter space of primordial black holes as dark matter by studying their evaporation to soft gamma-rays in nearby astrophysical structures. We point out that a new generation of proposed MeV gamma-ray telescopes will offer the unique opportunity to directly detect Hawking evaporation from observations of nearby …
Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the asteroid-mass range $(10^{-17}$--$10^{-12})~M_{\odot}$ almost entirely escape constraints as dark matter candidates. In the early universe, however, the Schwarzschild metric is no longer applicable and we must carefully consider PBH metrics with a proper cosmological embedding. In particular, the Thakurta solution stands out as perhaps the most adequate such solution. Notably, the Thakurta metric contains a time-dependent apparent horizon, proportional to the cosmological scale-factor. We show that this implies the PBHs are hotter than in the standard Schwa…
Near extremal Kerr black holes are subject to the Thorne limit $a<a^*_{\rm lim}=0.998$ in the case of thin disc accretion, or some generalized version of this in other disc geometries. However any limit that differs from the thermodynamics limit $a^* < 1$ can in principle be evaded in other astrophysical configurations, and in particular if the near extremal black holes are primordial and subject to evaporation by Hawking radiation only. We derive the lower mass limit above which Hawking radiation is slow enough so that a primordial black hole with a spin initially above some generalized Thorn…
For the current central values of the Higgs and top masses, the Standard Model Higgs potential develops an instability at a scale of the order of $10^{11}$ GeV. We show that a cosmological signature of such instability could be dark matter in the form of primordial black holes seeded by Higgs fluctuations during inflation. The existence of dark matter might not require physics beyond the Standard Model.
We show that primordial (nearly) extremal black holes with a wide range of masses from the Planck scale to around $10^9$ g could be cosmologically stable and explain dark matter, given a dark electromagnetism and a heavy dark electron. For individual black holes, Hawking radiation and Schwinger discharge processes are suppressed by near-extremality and the heaviness of the dark electron, respectively. In contrast, the merger events of binary systems provide an opportunity to directly observe Hawking radiation. Because the merger products are not extremal, they rapidly evaporate and produce tra…
Primordial black holes can have substantial spin -- a fundamental property that has a strong effect on its evaporation rate. We conduct a comprehensive study of the detectability of primordial black holes with non-negligible spin, via the searches for the neutrinos and positrons in the MeV energy range. Diffuse supernova neutrino background searches and observation of the 511 keV gamma-ray line from positrons in the Galactic center set competitive constraints. Spinning primordial black holes are probed up to a slightly higher mass range compared to non-spinning ones. Our constraint using neutr…
We consider light dark matter candidates originated from the evaporation of Schwarzschild primordial black holes, with masses in the range $10^{-5}-10^9$ g. These candidates are beyond Standard Model particles with negligible couplings to the other particles, so that they interact only gravitationally. Belonging to the category of warm dark matter, they nevertheless spoil structure formation, with a softer impact for increasing values of the candidate spin. Requiring such candidates to fully account for the observed dark matter, we find that the scenario of black hole domination is ruled out f…
It has recently been suggested that black hole remnants of primordial origin are not a viable dark matter candidate since they would have far too large a velocity due to the recoil of Hawking radiation. We re-examined this interesting claim in more details and found that it does not rule out such a possibility. On the contrary, for models based on non-commutativity of spacetime near the Planck scale, essentially the same argument can be used to estimate the scale at which non-commutativity effect becomes important. If dark matter "particles" are non-commutative black holes that have passed the…
We consider the possibility that the majority of dark matter in our Universe consists of black holes of primordial origin. We determine the conditions under which such black holes may have originated from a single-field model of inflation characterized by a quartic polynomial potential. We also explore the effect of higher-dimensional operators. The large power spectrum of curvature perturbations that is needed for a large black hole abundance sources sizable second order tensor perturbations. The resulting stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves could be detected by the future…
The non-observation of Hawking radiation from primordial black holes of $10^{16}$g sets a conservative strong bound on their cosmological abundance. We revisit this bound and show how it can be improved (both in mass reach and strength) by an adequate modeling of the combined AGN and blazar emission in the MeV range. We also estimate the sensitivity to the primordial black hole abundance of a future X-ray experiment capable of identifying a significantly larger number of astrophysical sources contributing to the diffuse background in this energy range.
We investigate the impact of radiation from primordial black holes (PBHs), in the mass range of $10^{15} \lesssim M_{\rm PBH} \lesssim 10^{17}~\rm g$ and $10^{2} \lesssim M_{\rm PBH} \lesssim 10^{4}~M_{\odot}$, on the 21-cm angular-power spectrum in the dark ages. PBHs in the former mass range effect the 21-cm angular-power spectrum through the evaporation known as Hawking radiation, while the radiation from the accretion process in the latter mass range. In the dark ages, radiation from PBHs can increase the ionization fraction and temperature of the intergalactic medium, change the global 21…
The mechanism of the generation of dark matter and dark radiation from the evaporation of primordial black holes is very interesting. We consider the case of Kerr black holes to generalize previous results obtained in the Schwarzschild case. For dark matter, the results do not change dramatically and the bounds on warm dark matter apply similarly: in particular, the Kerr case cannot save the scenario of black hole domination for light dark matter. For dark radiation, the expectations for $ΔN_{eff}$ do not change significantly with respect to the Schwarzschild case, but for an enhancement in th…
The radiation emitted by horizonless exotic compact objects (ECOs), such as wormholes, 2-2-holes, fuzzballs, gravastars, boson stars, collapsed polymers, superspinars etc., is expected to be strongly suppressed when compared to the radiation of black holes. If large primordial curvature fluctuations collapse into such objects instead of black holes, they do not evaporate or evaporate much slower than black holes and could thus constitute all of the dark matter with masses below $M < 10^{-16}M_\odot.$ We reevaluate the relevant experimental constraints for light ECOs in this mass range and show…
Light primordial black holes may comprise a dominant fraction of the dark matter in our Universe. This paper critically assesses whether planned and future gravitational wave detectors in the ultra-high-frequency band could constrain the fraction of dark matter composed of sub-solar primordial black holes. Adopting the state-of-the-art description of primordial black hole merger rates, we compare various signals with currently operating and planned detectors. As already noted in the literature, our findings confirm that detecting individual primordial black hole mergers with currently existing…
We investigate photon signatures of general decaying dark-matter particles in halos of primordial black holes. We derive the halo-profile density and the total decay rate for these combined dark-matter scenarios. For the case of axion-like particles of masses below $\mathcal{O}( 1 )\,$keV, we find strong bounds on the decay constant which are several orders of magnitude stronger than the strongest existing bounds, for all halo masses above $\mathcal{O}( 10^{-5} )$ solar masses. Using future X-ray measurements, it will be possible to push these bounds on such combined dark-matter scenarios even…
The structure and evolution of Primordial Antimatter domains and Dark matter objects are analysed. Relativistic low-density antimatter domains are described. The Relativistic FRW perfect-fluid solution is found for the characterization of i) ultra-high density antimatter domains, ii) high-density antimatter domains, and iii) dense anti-matter domains. The possible sub-domains structures is analyzed. The structures evolved to the time of galaxy formation are outlined. Comparison is given with other primordial celestial objects. The features of antistars are outlined. In the case of WIMP dark ma…
Primordial magnetic fields are often thought to be the early Universe seeds that have bloomed into what we observe today as galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields. Owing to their minuscule strength, primordial magnetic fields are very hard to detect in cosmological and astrophysical observations. We show how this changes if a part of neutral Dark Matter has a magnetic susceptibility. In this way, by studying Dark Matter one can obtain information about the properties of primordial magnetic fields, even if the latter have a comoving amplitude $B_0 \lesssim0.01~\mbox{nG}$. In our model Dark…
Z-boson exchange interaction induces attractive force between left-handed neutrino and neutron. The Ginzburg-Landau mean field calculation and the Bogoliubov transformation suggest that this attractive force leads to neutrino-neutron pair condensate and super-fluidity. When the result of super-fluid formation is applied to the early universe, horizon scale pair condensate may become a component of dark energy. A further accretion of other fermions from thermal cosmic medium gives a seed of primordial neutron stars made of proton, neutron, electron, and neutrino in beta-equilibrium. Primordial …
We study possibilities to explain the whole dark matter abundance by primordial black holes (PBHs) or to explain the merger rate of binary black holes estimated from the gravitational wave detections by LIGO/Virgo. We assume that the PBHs are originated in a radiation- or matter-dominated era from large primordial curvature perturbation generated by inflation. We take a simple model-independent approach considering inflation with large running spectral indices which are parametrized by $n_\text{s}, α_\text{s}$, and $β_\text{s}$ consistent with the observational bounds. The merger rate is fitte…
We use Planck data released in 2015 to constrain the abundance of primordial black holes (PBHs) in dark matter in two different reionization models (one is the instantaneous reionization and the other is the asymmetric reionization), and significantly improve the upper limits on the abundance of PBHs from WMAP 3-year data by around two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, these new limits imply that the event rates of mergers of PBH binaries (Gpc$^{-3}$ yr$^{-1}$) are less than $0.002$ for $M_\text{pbh}=30M_\odot$, $5$ for $M_\text{pbh}=10M_\odot$ and $2000$ for $M_\text{pbh}=2M_\odot$ at $95\%$ …
The detectability of gravitational waves originating from primordial black holes or other large macroscopic dark-matter candidates inspiraling into Sagittarius ${\rm A}^{\!*}$ is investigated. It is shown that LISA should be a formidable machine to detect the stochastic signal from the accumulated collection of such objects that have been gravitationally captured by Sgr$\,{\rm A}^{\!*}$, provided they have masses above $\sim 10^{-20}\,M_{\odot}$. This is especially so, if they are the main component of the dark matter, and the dark-matter density at Sagittarius ${\rm A}^{\!*}$ exceeds its valu…
We suggest a general relation between the position of the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum peaks and the inflationary slow roll parameter $ε$. This relation is based on interpreting the variable setting the position of the peaks as the quantum distance between the end of inflation and recombination. This distance is determined by the primordial cosmological Fisher information introduced in arXiv:2002.04294. The observational constraints set by cosmic microwave background temperature data lead to a very stringent prediction for the value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio: $r=0…
Very recently, it was suggested that combining the Swampland program with the smallness of the dark energy and confronting these ideas to experiment lead to the prediction of the existence of a single extra-dimension (dubbed the dark dimension) with characteristic length-scale in the micron range. We show that the rate of Hawking radiation slows down for black holes perceiving the dark dimension and discuss the impact of our findings in assessing the dark matter fraction that could be composed of primordial black holes. We demonstrate that for a species scale of ${\cal O}(10^{10}~{\rm GeV})$, …
The possibility that dark matter particles could be constituted by extreme regular primordial black holes is discussed. Extreme black holes have zero surface temperature, and are not subjected to the Hawking evaporation process. Assuming that the common horizon radius of these black holes is fixed by the minimum distance that is derived from the Riemann invariant computed from loop quantum gravity, the masses of these non-singular stable black holes are of the order of the Planck mass. However, if they are formed just after inflation, during reheating, their initial masses are about six orders…
The direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter interacting with nucleons is hampered by the low recoil energies induced by scatterings in the detectors. This experimental difficulty is avoided in the scenario of boosted dark matter where a component of dark matter particles is endowed with large kinetic energies. In this Letter, we point out that the current evaporation of primordial black holes with masses from $10^{14}$ to $10^{16}$ g is a source of boosted light dark matter with energies of tens to hundreds of MeV. Focusing on the XENON1T experiment, we show that these relativistic dark matter…
The accumulation of dark matter particles near the primordial black holes starts at the radiation-dominated cosmological stage and produces the central density spikes. The spikes can be the bright gamma-ray sources due to dark matter annihilation. We present the self-consistent derivation of the equation of motion of particle in the metrics of primordial black hole immersed into cosmological background. By numerical solution of this equation we find the central dark matter density profile. The density growth is suppressed in the central part of the profile compared with previous calculations.
The evaporations of Primordial Black Holes (PBH) (via Hawking radiation) can produce electrons/positrons ($e^-/e^+$) in the Galactic Centre (GC) region which under the influence of the magnetic field of Centre region can emit synchrotron radiation. These $e^-/e^+$ can also induce Inverse Compton radiation due to the scattering with ambient photons. In this work three different PBH mass distributions namely, monochromatic, power law and lognormal distributions are considered to calculate such radiation fluxes. On the other hand, annihilation or decay of dark matter in the Galactic Centre region…
