Inflationary primordial black holes for the LIGO gravitational wave events and pulsar timing array experiments

TL;DR

This paper explores how primordial black holes formed during cosmic inflation could explain LIGO gravitational wave events, considering constraints from pulsar timing arrays and CMB observations, and proposes a mechanism for generating the necessary sharp peak in the power spectrum.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism to produce a sharp peak in the primordial power spectrum, enabling PBH formation consistent with observational constraints and linking inflation to gravitational wave signals.

Findings

Current PTA experiments constrain second-order GWs from PBHs.

CMB $$ distortion limits the scalar power spectrum.

A sharp peak at $k \,\sim\, 10^{6}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ can produce sufficient PBHs.

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are one of the candidates to explain the gravitational wave (GW) signals observed by the LIGO detectors. Among several phenomena in the early Universe, cosmic inflation is a major example to generate PBHs from large primordial density perturbations. In this paper, we discuss the possibility to interpret the observed GW events as mergers of PBHs which are produced by cosmic inflation. The primordial curvature perturbation should be large enough to produce a sizable amount of PBHs and thus we have several other probes to test this scenario. We point out that the current pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments already put severe constraints on GWs generated via the second-order effects, and that the observation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) puts severe restriction on its $\mu$ distortion. In particular, it is found that the scalar power spectrum should have a very sharp peak at $k \sim 10^{6}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ to fulfill the required abundance of PBHs while evading constraints from the PTA experiments together with the $\mu$ distortion. We propose a mechanism which can realize such a sharp peak. In the future, simple inflation models that generate PBHs via almost Gaussian fluctuations could be probed/excluded.