Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

LIGO/Virgo black holes and dark matter: The effect of spatial clustering

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2007.07212 v4 pith:VQQM4MXM submitted 2020-07-14 astro-ph.CO gr-qc

LIGO/Virgo black holes and dark matter: The effect of spatial clustering

classification astro-ph.CO gr-qc
keywords mergerrateclusteringpbhsblackholesligoclustered
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We discuss the effect of clustering for the determination of the merger rate of binary black holes in the LIGO mass range. While for a Poissonian initial distribution, and assuming isolated binaries, the allowed fraction of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) to dark matter (DM) is a few percent, we show that this bound can be relaxed if PBHs are clustered. More precisely we show that for large clustering the merger rate can drop with increasing fraction of PBHs, introducing a degeneracy in the parameters of the theory consistent with a given present merger rate, and allowing all the DM to be in the form of stellar mass PBHs. This degeneracy can however be broken by looking at the evolution of the merger rate with redshift. For a simple clustering model that we consider, we show that the LIGO projected sensitivity can disentangle, through the observation of a stochastic background of gravitational waves, different clustered distributions having the same present merger rate.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Smoluchowski Coagulation Equation and the Evolution of Primordial Black Hole Clusters

    astro-ph.CO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Monte Carlo solutions to the Smoluchowski coagulation equation yield runaway timescales and mass evolution for primordial black hole clusters at different redshifts based on cluster properties.

  2. Smoluchowski Coagulation Equation and the Evolution of Primordial Black Hole Clusters

    astro-ph.CO 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Monte Carlo solutions of the Smoluchowski equation for PBH clusters yield finite runaway timescales and evolving mass distributions that form high-redshift SMBHs, shortened further by mass segregation.

  3. Merger rate of initially clustered primordial black holes for the two-body channel

    astro-ph.CO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Weak initial clustering of primordial black holes reduces the PBH fraction needed to explain LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA mergers in the two-body channel, while strong clustering suppresses the rate via three-body formation.

  4. Hunting Dark Matter with the Einstein Telescope

    astro-ph.CO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Clustered primordial black holes may constitute all dark matter and produce a flat stochastic gravitational wave background detectable by the Einstein Telescope.