Open questions around primordial black holes

Paper Title:

The Future of Primordial Black Holes: Open Questions and Roadmap

Published on:

5 March 2024

Primary Category:

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Paper Authors:

Antonio Riotto,

Joe Silk

Bullets

Key Details

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What is the abundance of primordial black holes across the mass spectrum

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How significantly do primordial black holes cluster and affect their merger rates

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What fraction of current gravitational wave events are primordial black hole binaries

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Are primordial black holes the dark matter, especially in the unconstrained asteroid mass range

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Future gravitational wave detectors and multimessenger experiments provide smoking gun probes of primordial black holes to high redshifts and low masses

Explore the topics in this paper

astrophysics

cosmology

dark matter

gravitational waves

primordial black holes

AI generated summary

Open questions around primordial black holes

This paper discusses key open questions and future research directions related to primordial black holes (PBHs). PBHs are hypothetical black holes that may have formed in the early universe. Though not confirmed, they are an intriguing dark matter candidate and could play various roles in astrophysics and cosmology. The paper summarizes open theoretical and observational issues around constraining PBH abundance across the mass spectrum, assessing their clustering properties and merger rates, evaluating their contribution to detected gravitational wave events, and testing whether they make up all dark matter. It then outlines a detailed roadmap spanning gravitational wave detectors, microlensing surveys, 21cm experiments, and more, that can provide definitive tests for PBHs in the coming years through smoking gun signatures like high redshift mergers and sub-solar mass detections.