Antonio Iovino "Cosmic Whispers of the Early Universe: Gravitational Waves and Dark Matter from Primordial Black Holes"
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Europe/Rome
Sala Fiore (Marconi)
Sala Fiore
Marconi
Description
The standard mechanism for the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) is based on the critical collapse of cosmological fluctuations. The underlying idea is that during inflation, large cosmological fluctuations could have been generated. After inflation, when the cosmic horizon reached a size comparable to these fluctuations, if the latter were high enough, they could collapse and form a PBH.
Beyond the fascinating possibility that these compact objects might make up all or part of the Dark Matter (DM) we observe today, their formation and existence is also associated with the generation of gravitational waves (GWs). These waves could contribute to the merger events observed by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Collaboration (LVK) or account for signals detected by pulsar timing array experiments (PTA).
In this talk , we investigate the PBH scenario, examining the computation of the abundance beyond the Gaussian paradigm. Then, we discuss how PBH formation can produce a stochastic GW background and how observations, related to recent experiments such as LVK and PTA collaborations, can help in distinguishing between different PBH production models.
We conclude by discussing other explanations of the recent observations by the Pulsar timing array collaborations (PTA).
