Primordial black holes may owe their origin to the small-scale enhancement of the comoving curva- ture perturbation generated during inflation. Their mass fraction at formation is markedly sensitive to possible non-Gaussianities in such large, but rare fluctuations. We discuss a path-integral formu- lation which provides the exact mass fraction of primordial black holes at formation in the presence of non-Gaussianity. Through a couple of classes of models, one based on single-field inflation and the other on spectator fields, we show that restricting to a Gaussian statistics may lead to severe inac- curacies in the estimate of the mass fraction as well as on the clustering properties of the primordial black holes.
Address
Département de Physique Théorique
Université de Genève
24, quai Ernest Ansermet
1211 Genève 4
Switzerland
Directions & contact