Accounting for the minimal mass spread of primordial black holes from gravitational collapse suppresses the Poltergeist GW background to the level of generic scalar-induced signals and reopens ultra-light PBH parameter space.
Primordial Black Holes from the QCD axion
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abstract
We propose a mechanism to generate Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) which is independent of cosmological inflation and occurs slightly below the QCD phase transition. Our setup relies on the collapse of long-lived string-domain wall networks and is naturally realized in QCD axion models with domain wall number $N_{DW}>1$ and Peccei-Quinn symmetry broken after inflation. In our framework, dark matter is mostly composed of axions in the meV mass range along with a small fraction, $\Omega_{\text{PBH}} \gtrsim 10^{-6} \Omega_{\text{CDM}} $ of heavy $M \sim 10^4-10^7 M_\odot$ PBHs. The latter could play a role in alleviating some of the shortcomings of the $\Lambda$CDM model on sub-galactic scales. The scenario has distinct signatures in ongoing axion searches as well as gravitational wave observatories.
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Tensor perturbations from first-order phase transitions and domain wall annihilation induce curvature fluctuations at second order that form primordial black holes, allowing asteroid-mass PBHs to comprise all dark matter for specific parameter ranges with associated gravitational wave peaks in LISA,
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Gravitational Waves from Black Hole Reheating: The Scalar-Induced Component
Accounting for the minimal mass spread of primordial black holes from gravitational collapse suppresses the Poltergeist GW background to the level of generic scalar-induced signals and reopens ultra-light PBH parameter space.
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Primordial Black Hole from Tensor-induced Density Fluctuation: First-order Phase Transitions and Domain Walls
Tensor perturbations from first-order phase transitions and domain wall annihilation induce curvature fluctuations at second order that form primordial black holes, allowing asteroid-mass PBHs to comprise all dark matter for specific parameter ranges with associated gravitational wave peaks in LISA,