Small-scale primordial fluctuations in the 21cm Dark Ages signal

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small-scale primordial fluctuations, linked to primordial black holes, could influence the 21cm Dark Ages signal, potentially revealing new insights into inflation models and black hole origins.

Contribution

It introduces the first detailed prediction of the 21cm signal incorporating primordial fluctuations motivated by single-field inflation models, highlighting their importance for PBH-related signals.

Findings

Primordial fluctuations can significantly boost the 21cm power spectrum.

Including primordial fluctuations prevents underestimating the 21cm signal.

Detection prospects depend on PBH mass and abundance.

Abstract

Primordial black hole production in the mass range $10-10^4 \,{\rm M_\odot}$ is motivated respectively by interpretations of the LIGO/Virgo observations of binary black hole mergers and by their ability to seed intermediate black holes which would account for the presence of supermassive black holes at very high redshift. Their existence would imply a boost in the primordial power spectrum if they were produced by overdensities reentering the horizon and collapsing after single-field inflation. This, together with their associated Poisson fluctuations would cause a boost in the matter power spectrum on small scales. In fact, any evidence of extra power above that of an almost scale-invariant primordial power spectrum on small scales would suggest a non-single-field slow-roll model of inflation, whether or not primordial black holes were produced. The extra power could become potentially observable in the 21cm power spectrum on scales around $k\sim0.1 - 50\,{\rm Mpc^{-1}}$ either with the new generation of filled low frequency interferometers. We explicitly include the contribution from primordial fluctuations in our prediction of the 21cm signal which has been previously neglected, by constructing primordial power spectra motivated by single-field models of inflation that would produce extra power on small scales. We find that depending on the mass and abundance of primordial black holes, it is important to include this contribution from the primordial fluctuations, so as not to underestimate the 21cm signal. Evidently our predictions of detectability, which lack any modelling of foregrounds, are unrealistic, but we hope that they will motivate improved cleaning algorithms that can enable us to access this intriguing corner of PBH-motivated parameter space.