English

NANOGrav Hints to Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2021-02-03 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The NANOGrav Collaboration has recently published a strong evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process that may be interpreted as a stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that such a signal can be explained by second-order gravitational waves produced during the formation of primordial black holes from the collapse of sizeable scalar perturbations generated during inflation. This possibility has two predictions: ii) the primordial black holes may comprise the totality of the dark matter with the dominant contribution to their mass function falling in the range (1015÷1011)M(10^{-15}\div 10^{-11}) M_\odot and iiii) the gravitational wave stochastic background will be seen as well by the LISA experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.08268,
  title  = {NANOGrav Hints to Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter},
  author = {V. De Luca and G. Franciolini and A. Riotto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.08268},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure. v2 : matching version published in PRL