Clusters of Primordial Black Holes

Abstract

© 2019, The Author(s). The Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are a well-established probe for new physics in the very early Universe. We discuss here the possibility of PBH agglomeration into clusters that may have several prominent observable features. The clusters can form due to closed domain walls appearance in the natural and hybrid inflation models whose subsequent evolution leads to PBH formation. The dynamical evolution of such clusters discussed here is of crucial importance. Such a model inherits all the advantages of uniformly distributed PBHs, like possible explanation of supermassive black holes existence (origin of the early quasars), the binary black hole mergers registered by LIGO/Virgo through gravitational waves, which could provide ways to test the model in future, the contribution to reionization of the Universe. If PBHs form clusters, they could alleviate or completely avoid existing constraints on the abundance of uniformly distributed to PBH, thus allowing PBH to be a viable dark matter candidate. Most of the existing constraints on uniform PBH density should be re-considered to the case of PBH clustering. Furthermore, unidentified cosmic gamma-ray point-like sources could be (partially) accounted. We conclude that models leading to PBH clustering are favored compared to models predicting the uniform distribution of PBHs.