Primordial Black Hole Formation During Slow Reheating After Inflation

Abstract

We study the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) in the early Universe during a period of slow reheating after inflation. We demonstrate how the PBH formation mechanism may change even before the end of the matter-dominated phase and calculate the expected PBH mass function. We find that there is a threshold for the variance of the density contrast, ${\sigma }_c\simeq 0.05$, below which the transition occurs even before reheating, with this having important consequences for the PBH mass function. We also show that there is a maximum cut-off for the PBH mass at around $100M_{\odot }$, below which the subdominant radiation bath affects PBH production, making the scenario particularly interesting for the recent LIGO observations of black hole mergers.

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures. v2: added discussion and references; matches the published version