paper

Primordial Black Holes from non-Gaussian tails

arXiv:1906.02827

Abstract

We develop a primordial black hole (PBH) production mechanism, deriving non-Gaussian tails from interacting quantum fields during early universe inflation. The multi-field potential landscape may contain relatively flat directions, as a result of energetically favorable adjustments of fields coupled to the inflaton. Such additional fields do not contribute to CMB fluctuations given a sufficient large-scale decay, related to a gap in the critical exponents computed using stochastic methods. Along such directions transverse to the inflaton, the field makes rare jumps to large values. Mixing with the inflaton leads to a substantial tail in the resulting probability distribution for the primordial perturbations. Incorporating a large number of flavors of fields ensures theoretical control of radiative corrections and a substantial abundance. This generates significant PBH production for a reasonable window of parameters, with the mass range determined by the time period of mixing and the inflationary Hubble scale. We analyze a particular model in detail, and then comment on a broader family of models in this class which suggests a mechanism for primordial seeds for early super-massive black holes in the universe. Along the way, we encounter an analytically tractable example of stochastic dynamics and provide some representative calculations of its correlations and probability distributions.

arXiv comment30 pages. v2: added references

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