pith. sign in

Primordial black hole and wormhole formation by domain walls

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

In theories with a broken discrete symmetry, Hubble sized spherical domain walls may spontaneously nucleate during inflation. These objects are subsequently stretched by the inflationary expansion, resulting in a broad distribution of sizes. The fate of the walls after inflation depends on their radius. Walls smaller than a critical radius fall within the cosmological horizon early on and collapse due to their own tension, forming ordinary black holes. But if a wall is large enough, its repulsive gravitational field becomes dominant much before the wall can fall within the cosmological horizon. In this "supercritical" case, a wormhole throat develops, connecting the ambient exterior FRW universe with an interior baby universe, where the exponential growth of the wall radius takes place. The wormhole pinches off in a time-scale comparable to its light-crossing time, and black holes are formed at its two mouths. As discussed in previous work, the resulting black hole population has a wide distribution of masses and can have significant astrophysical effects. The mechanism of black hole formation has been previously studied for a dust-dominated universe. Here we investigate the case of a radiation-dominated universe, which is more relevant cosmologically, by using numerical simulations in order to find the initial mass of a black hole as a function of the wall size at the end of inflation. For large supercritical domain walls, this mass nearly saturates the upper bound according to which the black hole cannot be larger than the cosmological horizon. We also find that the subsequent accretion of radiation satisfies a scaling relation, resulting in a mass increase by about a factor of 2.

citation-role summary

background 3 method 1

citation-polarity summary

years

2026 4 2020 2

clear filters

representative citing papers

Cuspidal Singularities in Collapsing Domain Walls

hep-th · 2026-05-21 · conditional · novelty 7.0

Collapsing domain walls generically form cuspidal edge and vertex singularities captured by Nambu-Goto and eikonal approximations and reproduced in field theory simulations.

Constraints on Primordial Black Holes

astro-ph.CO · 2020-02-27 · accept · novelty 4.0

Updated compilation shows PBHs are tightly constrained across 55 orders of magnitude in mass, ruling out dominant dark matter contributions except in narrow windows, with many limits carrying observational uncertainties.

citing papers explorer

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers after filters.