Cosmic Conundra Explained by Thermal History and Primordial Black Holes

Abstract

A universal mechanism may be responsible for several unresolved cosmic conundra. The sudden drop in the pressure of relativistic matter at $W^{\pm }/Z^0$ decoupling, the quark--hadron transition and $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation enhances the probability of primordial black hole (PBH) formation in the early Universe. Assuming the amplitude of the primordial curvature fluctuations is approximately scale-invariant, this implies a multi-modal PBH mass spectrum with peaks at $10^{-6}$, 1, 30, and $10^6{M}_{\odot }$. This suggests a unified PBH scenario which naturally explains the dark matter and recent microlensing observations, the LIGO/Virgo black hole mergers, the correlations in the cosmic infrared and X-ray backgrounds, and the origin of the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei at high redshift. A distinctive prediction of our model is that LIGO/Virgo should observe black hole mergers in the mass gaps between 2 and $5M_{\odot }$ (where no stellar remnants are expected) and above $65M_{\odot }$ (where pair-instability supernovae occur) and low-mass-ratios in between. Therefore the recent detection of events GW190425, GW190814 and GW190521 with these features is striking confirmation of our prediction and may indicate a primordial origin for the black holes. In this case, the exponential sensitivity of the PBH abundance to the equation of state would offer a unique probe of the QCD phase transition. The detection of PBHs would also offer a novel way to probe the existence of new particles or phase transitions with energy between $1\mathrm{MeV}$ and $10^{10}$GeV.

arXiv commentv4: changes to match final version; the model proposed in this work predicted GW190425, GW190814 and GW190521

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