We discuss several inflationary mechanisms for seeding the formation of primordial black holes (PBH), which lead to a diversity of initial mass functions. Some scenarios are based on inflationary relics, such as high energy vacuum bubble remnants, while others are based on the collapse of standard adiabatic perturbations. We point out that the two mechanisms may often coexist. We also report on recent progress in determining the PBH mass function in a universe filled with nearly Gaussian adiabatic perturbations with an extended power spectrum. Our results may significantly impact overproduction bounds on the amplitude of the power spectrum, and tighten the viable mass range for primordial black holes as dark matter.

Biography

Jaume Garriga is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Barcelona since 2021, following his tenure as associate professor at UAB/IFAE since 1994. He is a specialist in general relativity, quantum field theory in curved space, and inflation, with pioneering contributions to the theory of cosmological perturbations, brane world gravity and cosmology, and vacuum transitions in the multiverse. He received the Young investigator Distinction from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2002. He is a founding member of the Gravitation, Strings and Cosmology consolidated group at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, ICCUB.

Inviter: Shi Pi