Exploring Primordial Black Holes from the Multiverse with Optical Telescopes

Alexander Kusenko, Misao Sasaki, Sunao Sugiyama, Masahiro Takada, Volodymyr Takhistov, and Edoardo Vitagliano

Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 181304 – Published 30 October 2020

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are a viable candidate for dark matter if the PBH masses are in the currently unconstrained “sublunar” mass range. We revisit the possibility that PBHs were produced by nucleation of false vacuum bubbles during inflation. We show that this scenario can produce a population of PBHs that simultaneously accounts for all dark matter, explains the candidate event in the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) data, and contains both heavy black holes as observed by LIGO and very heavy seeds of supermassive black holes. We demonstrate with numerical studies that future observations of HSC, as well as other optical surveys, such as LSST, will be able to provide a definitive test for this generic PBH formation mechanism if it is the dominant source of dark matter.

Received 10 February 2020
Accepted 2 October 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.181304

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Cosmology Dark matter Massive compact halo objects

Classical black holes

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Alexander Kusenko^1,2, Misao Sasaki ^2,3,4, Sunao Sugiyama ^2,5, Masahiro Takada ², Volodymyr Takhistov¹, and Edoardo Vitagliano ¹

¹Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 90095-1547, USA
²Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), UTIAS The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan
³Center for Gravitational Physics, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
⁴Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
⁵Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan