Primordial black holes from confinement

by Michael Zantedeschi (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Thursday 18 Nov 2021, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Virtual Seminar Room (IFAE)

Primordial black holes are very interesting candidates for dark matter. However, their formation is still a mystery. In this talk, I will present a generic mechanism in which primordial black holes are formed by the early Universe ``ancestor” of the same force that confines quarks inside hadrons. In this scenario, heavy quarks of a confining gauge theory produced by de Sitter fluctuations are diluted by the inflationary expansion and are confined upon horizon re-entry. The large amount of energy stored in the coloured flux tubes connecting the quark pairs leads to black-holes formation. I will discuss phenomenological features of the new mechanism and show that it can account for both the entirety of dark matter and the supermassive black holes in galactic centres. Under proper conditions, the scenario can be realised in a generic confinement theory, including ordinary QCD. Moreover, its gravitational-wave signal could be relevant in view of the recent NANOGrav data.