Primordial black hole dark matter from catastrogenesis with unstable pseudo-Goldstone bosons

Abstract

We propose a new scenario for the formation of asteroid-mass primordial black holes (PBHs). Our mechanism is based on the annihilation of the string-wall network associated with the breaking of a $U(1)$ global symmetry into a discrete $Z_N$ symmetry. If the potential has multiple local minima ($N>1$) the network is stable, and the annihilation is guaranteed by a bias among the different vacua. The collapse of the string-wall network is accompanied by catastrogenesis, a large production of pseudo-Goldstone bosons (pGBs) -- e.g. axions, ALPs, or majorons -- gravitational waves, and PBHs. If pGBs rapidly decay into products that thermalize, as predicted e.g. in the high-quality QCD axion and heavy majoron models, they do not contribute to the dark matter population, but we show that PBHs can constitute 100\% of the dark matter. The gravitational wave background produced by catastrogenesis with heavy unstable axions, ALPs, or majorons could be visible in future interferometers.

24 pages, 4 figures. Matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Primordial Black Hole Archaeology with Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Strings
• Spectrum of global string networks and the axion dark matter mass
• Primordial Black Holes from Axion Domain Wall Collapse
• STOLAS: STOchastic LAttice Simulation of cosmic inflation
• Diraxiogenesis
• Catastrogenesis with unstable ALPs as the origin of the NANOGrav 15 yr gravitational wave signal
• Primordial black holes: constraints, potential evidence and prospects
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• Irreducible cosmological backgrounds of a real scalar with a broken symmetry
• Dynamics of $Z_N$ domain walls with bias directions
• Gravitational Wave Mountains: current-carrying domain walls
• Biased Domain Walls and the Origin of Early Massive Structures
• The Dark Side of the Moon: Listening to Scalar-Induced Gravitational Waves