Gravitational Waves from Peaks

Abstract

We discuss a novel mechanism to generate gravitational waves in the early universe. A standard way to produce primordial black holes is to enhance at small-scales the overdensity perturbations generated during inflation. The latter, upon horizon re-entry, collapse into black holes. They must be sizeable enough and are therefore associated to rare peaks. There are however less sizeable and much less rare overdensity peaks which do not end up forming primordial black holes and have a non-spherical shape. Upon collapse, they possess a time-dependent non-vanishing mass quadrupole which gives rise to the generation of gravitational waves. By their nature, such gravitational waves are complementary to those sourced at second-order by the very same scalar perturbations responsible for the formation of the primordial black holes. Their amplitude is nevertheless typically about two orders of magnitude smaller and therefore hardly measurable.

10 pages, 5 figures, matching published version

References in corpus (12)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• New Horizons for Fundamental Physics with LISA
• Primordial black holes and secondary gravitational waves from k/G inflation
• Gravitational Wave Anisotropies from Primordial Black Holes
• Constraints on primordial curvature perturbations from primordial black hole dark matter and secondary gravitational waves
• Scalar induced gravitational waves in light of Pulsar Timing Array data
• Gravitational Waves from Density Perturbations in an Early Matter Domination Era
• Heavy primordial black holes from strongly clustered light black holes
• Primordial Non-Gaussianity from G-inflation
• Anatomy of the Electroweak Phase Transition for Dark Sector induced Baryogenesis
• Gravitational waves from rapid structure formation on microscopic scales before matter-radiation equality