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Observational Evidence for Primordial Black Holes: A Positivist Perspective

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arxiv 2306.03903 v2 pith:KMVLTA3D submitted 2023-06-06 astro-ph.CO gr-qchep-ph

classification astro-ph.COgr-qchep-ph
keywords pbhsmassaroundblackdarkgalacticgalaxiesholes
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

We review numerous arguments for primordial black holes (PBHs) based on observational evidence from a variety of lensing, dynamical, accretion and gravitational-wave effects. This represents a shift from the usual emphasis on PBH constraints and provides what we term a positivist perspective. Microlensing observations of stars and quasars suggest that PBHs of around $1\,M_{\odot}$ could provide much of the dark matter in galactic halos, this being allowed by the Large Magellanic Cloud microlensing observations if the PBHs have an extended mass function. More generally, providing the mass and dark matter fraction of the PBHs is large enough, the associated Poisson fluctuations could generate the first bound objects at a much earlier epoch than in the standard cosmological scenario. This simultaneously explains the recent detection of high-redshift dwarf galaxies, puzzling correlations of the source-subtracted infrared and X-ray cosmic backgrounds, the size and the mass-to-light ratios of ultra-faint-dwarf galaxies, the dynamical heating of the Galactic disk, and the binary coalescences observed by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA in a mass range not usually associated with stellar remnants. Even if PBHs provide only a small fraction of the dark matter, they could explain various other observational conundra, and sufficiently large ones could seed the supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei or even early galaxies themselves. We argue that PBHs would naturally have formed around the electroweak, quantum chromodynamics and electron-positron annihilation epochs, when the sound-speed inevitably dips. This leads to an extended PBH mass function with a number of distinct bumps, the most prominent one being at around $1\,M_{\odot}$, and this would allow PBHs to explain many of the observations in a unified way.

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Cited by 17 Pith papers

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

  1. Harvesting primordial black holes from stochastic trees with $\texttt{FOREST}$

    astro-ph.CO 2025-01 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A stochastic-branching-tree implementation of inflation, FOREST, computes curvature maps and primordial black hole mass functions with cloud-in-cloud effects included.

  2. The gravitational-wave fingerprint of dynamically assembled primordial black hole cluster seeds in JWST's Little Red Dots

    gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    Strongly clustered PBHs with a QCD-broad mass function form IMBH nuclei plus light-PBH swarms that assemble LRD-scale seeds in 10-50 Myr and radiate a truncated f^{2/3} GW background topped by a ringdown comb.

  3. Do Primordial Black Hole Clusters Survive the Galaxy? Collisional Disruption and Microlensing Implications

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Cluster-cluster collisions strip 50–96% of 10^6–10^7 M⊙ PBH cluster mass by z=0, so microlensing sightlines to the Magellanic Clouds are ~49–92% smooth.

  4. Primordial Black Hole mass growth from neutrinos during the radiation era

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    PBHs of ~1e3–1e7 solar masses can significantly grow by absorbing neutrinos before matter-radiation equality.

  5. Primordial black hole in Lorentz-violating theories: Insights from Bumblebee gravity

    gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Bumblebee gravity enhances primordial black hole abundance through three mechanisms, but the model harbors a ghost instability and a tachyonic instability that make it cosmologically unviable.

  6. Effect of post-recombination accretion on primordial binary black hole mergers within virialized dark matter halos

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    BHL-type post-recombination accretion can raise late three-body PBH merger rates enough for TianQin detections at f~10^{-6} and for LVK limits to bound delayed virialization.

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    In hybrid inflation, stochastic noise breaks topological defects into sub-Hubble-scale structures, and only the n=1 case leaves a global imprint on the curvature perturbation.

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    astro-ph.CO 2025-11 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Adding a constant drift to time-reversed stochastic inflation in a flat potential yields an exact curvature distribution with exponential tails; forward and reverse delta-N formalisms differ by a factor of two in the ...

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    hep-ph 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

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  10. Primordial black hole induced gravitational waves in $f(R)$ gravity

    astro-ph.CO 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    In R^(1+ε) gravity, exponential growth of scalar perturbations during a PBH-driven early matter era enhances the induced gravitational wave signal, with Ω_GW ∝ f on large scales.

  11. Gravitational wave signatures of primordial black hole accretion during early matter domination

    hep-ph 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    PBHs that form in a radiation era and accrete during an early matter era could produce a two-peak GW background detectable by LISA or BBO for asteroid-mass PBHs as all of dark matter.

  12. Imprints of Large-Scale Structures in the Anisotropies of the Cosmological Gravitational Wave Background

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    The cosmological gravitational wave background is predicted to cross-correlate with galaxy positions through the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, giving a source-discrimination handle and a forecast improvement of ...

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    gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

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    astro-ph.CO 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A Bayesian analysis shows that a future sub-solar PBH detection would make the primordial SIGW interpretation of PTA data favored over the SMBH interpretation, but this preference is driven by the detection prior.

  15. A fast deep-learning approach to probing primordial black hole populations in gravitational wave events

    gr-qc 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A neural network maps single-event gravitational-wave posterior samples to joint PBH population posteriors in about one second on a GPU, with calibration matching MCMC on simulated catalogs.

  16. Probing Primordial Black Holes with upcoming Radio Telescopes: a case study for LOFAR2.0, FAST Core Array and BINGO

    astro-ph.CO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    LOFAR2.0, FAST Core Array and BINGO can constrain the PBH dark matter fraction f_PBH below 0.16-0.39 for masses above 10^{-2} to 10 solar masses via FRB lensing statistics.

  17. Cosmological constraints on small-scale primordial non-Gaussianity

    astro-ph.CO 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Current pulsar-timing, CMB, BAO and PBH data constrain the small-scale local f_NL to -10.0 < f_NL < 1.2 for a monochromatic primordial power spectrum, with that constraint conditional on the spectral amplitude A_zeta = 10^-2.

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