Primordial Black Holes Dark Matter and Secondary Gravitational Waves from Warm Higgs-G Inflation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how warm Higgs-G inflation with Galileon-like kinetic terms can produce primordial black holes that account for dark matter and generate detectable secondary gravitational waves, consistent with theoretical constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a non-canonical warm inflation model driven by the Standard Model Higgs with Galileon terms, showing enhanced power spectrum and PBH formation in the asteroid mass range.

Findings

Primordial black holes in the asteroid mass window can explain dark matter.

Secondary gravitational waves from small-scale fluctuations are detectable by future GW observatories.

The model aligns with swampland and trans-Planckian censorship conjectures.

Abstract

We explore the role of dissipative effects during warm inflation leading to the small-scale enhancement of the power spectrum of curvature perturbations. In this paper, we specifically focus on non-canonical warm inflationary scenarios and study a model of warm Higgs-G inflation, in which the Standard Model Higgs boson drives inflation, with a Galileon-like non-linear kinetic term. We show that in the Galileon-dominated regime, the primordial power spectrum is strongly enhanced, leading to the formation of primordial black holes (PBH) with a wide range of the mass spectrum. Interestingly, PBHs in the asteroid mass window $\sim (10^{17}$ -- $10^{23}$) g are generated in this model, which can explain the total abundance of the dark matter in the Universe. In our analysis, we also calculate the secondary gravitational waves (GW) sourced by these small-scale overdense fluctuations and find that the induced GW spectrum can be detected in the future GW detectors, such as LISA, BBO, DECIGO, etc. Our scenario thus provides a novel way of generating PBHs as dark matter and a detectable stochastic GW background from warm inflation. We also show that our scenario is consistent with the swampland and the trans-Planckian censorship conjectures and, thus, remains in the viable landscape of UV complete theories.