Gravitational Waves from Primordial Black Hole Mergers

TL;DR

This paper investigates primordial black hole mergers as sources of gravitational waves, exploring their abundance, mass distribution, and cosmological implications, and assesses their detectability with current and future gravitational wave observatories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of PBH merger rates considering extended mass functions and clustering, deriving new constraints on PBH dark matter fractions from gravitational wave observations.

Findings

PBH mergers can explain LIGO events within existing constraints.

Non-observation of gravitational wave background constrains PBH dark matter to less than a few percent.

Predicted gravitational wave background is detectable by upcoming LIGO runs.

Abstract

We study the production of primordial black hole (PBH) binaries and the resulting merger rate, accounting for an extended PBH mass function and the possibility of a clustered spatial distribution. Under the hypothesis that the gravitational wave events observed by LIGO were caused by PBH mergers, we show that it is possible to satisfy all present constraints on the PBH abundance, and find the viable parameter range for the lognormal PBH mass function. The non-observation of gravitational wave background allows us to derive constraints on the fraction of dark matter in PBHs, which are stronger than any other current constraint in the PBH mass range $0.5-30M_\odot$. We show that the predicted gravitational wave background can be observed by the coming runs of LIGO, and non-observation would indicate that the observed events are not of primordial origin. As the PBH mergers convert matter into radiation, they may have interesting cosmological implications, for example, in the context of relieving the tension between the high and low redshift measurements of the Hubble constant. However, we find that these effects are negligible as, after recombination, no more that $1\%$ of DM can be converted into gravitational waves.