Testing scenarios of primordial black holes being the seeds of supermassive black holes by ultracompact minihalos and CMB $\mu$-distortions

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether primordial black holes could be the seeds of supermassive black holes by analyzing CMB distortions and ultracompact minihalos, ultimately constraining the PBH mass range and their role in cosmic structure formation.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to exclude smaller primordial black holes by linking density perturbations, ultracompact minihalos, and dark matter annihilation signals.

Findings

PBHs in the mass range 6×10^4 to 5×10^13 solar masses are excluded by CMB distortion constraints.

Ultracompact minihalos produce excess cosmic rays from WIMP annihilation, constraining dark matter models.

A novel approach to exclude smaller PBHs based on UCMH-induced cosmic ray fluxes.

Abstract

Supermassive black holes and intermediate mass black holes are believed to exist in the Universe. There is no established astrophysical explanation for their origin and considerations have been made in the literature that those massive black holes (MBHs) may be primordial black holes (PBHs), black holes which are formed in the early universe (well before the matter-radiation equality) due to the direct collapse of primordial overdensities. This paper aims at discussing the possibility of excluding the PBH scenario as the origin of the MBHs. We first revisit the constraints on PBHs obtained from the CMB distortion that the seed density perturbation causes. By adopting a recent computation of the CMB distortion sourced by the seed density perturbation and the stronger constraint on the CMB distortion set by the COBE/FIRAS experiment used in the literature, we find that PBHs in the mass range $6\times 10^4~M_\odot \sim 5 \times 10^{13}~M_\odot$ are excluded. Since PBHs lighter than $6 \times 10^4~M_\odot$ are not excluded from the non-observation of the CMB distortion, we propose a new method which can potentially exclude smaller PBHs as well. Based on the observation that large density perturbations required to create PBHs also result in the copious production of ultracompact minihalos (UCMHs), compact dark matter halos formed at around the recombination, we show that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) as dark matter annihilate efficiently inside UCMHs to yield cosmic rays far exceeding the observed flux. Our bound gives severe restriction on the compatibility between the particle physics models for WIMPs and the PBH scenario as the explanation of MBHs.