Université de GenèveDépartement de Physique ThéoriqueCAP Genève

Testing primordial black holes as dark matter through LISA

Date: 
29. October 2018
Cite as: 
N. Bartolo, V. De Luca, G. Franciolini, M. Peloso, D. Racco and A. Riotto, [arXiv:1810.12224].
Summary: 

The idea that primordial black holes (PBHs) can comprise most of the dark matter of the universe has recently reacquired a lot of momentum. Observational constraints, however, rule out this possibility for most of the PBH masses, with a notable exception around 10^{-12} M_\odot. These light PBHs may be originated when a sizeable comoving curvature perturbation generated during inflation re-enters the horizon during the radiation phase. During such a stage, it is unavoidable that gravitational waves (GWs) are generated. Since their source is quadratic in the curvature perturbations, these GWs are necessarily fully non-Gaussian. Their frequency today is about the mHz, which is exactly the range where the LISA mission has the maximum of its sensitivity. This is certainly an impressive coincidence. We show that this scenario of PBHs as dark matter can be tested by LISA by measuring not only the GW two-point correlator, but also the GW three-point correlator for which we study the LISA response functions and construct a suitable estimator to test the non-Gaussianity of GWs.

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