Primordial black hole and wormhole formation by domain walls

Journal Article · Sat Apr 01 04:00:00 EDT 2017 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2017/04/050· OSTI ID:22679891

Deng, Heling; Garriga, Jaume; Vilenkin, Alexander ^[1]

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1. Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University, 574 Boston Ave, Medford, MA, 02155 (United States)

In theories with a broken discrete symmetry, Hubble sized spherical domain walls may spontaneously nucleate during inflation. These objects are subsequently stretched by the inflationary expansion, resulting in a broad distribution of sizes. The fate of the walls after inflation depends on their radius. Walls smaller than a critical radius fall within the cosmological horizon early on and collapse due to their own tension, forming ordinary black holes. But if a wall is large enough, its repulsive gravitational field becomes dominant much before the wall can fall within the cosmological horizon. In this ''supercritical'' case, a wormhole throat develops, connecting the ambient exterior FRW universe with an interior baby universe, where the exponential growth of the wall radius takes place. The wormhole pinches off in a time-scale comparable to its light-crossing time, and black holes are formed at its two mouths. As discussed in previous work, the resulting black hole population has a wide distribution of masses and can have significant astrophysical effects. The mechanism of black hole formation has been previously studied for a dust-dominated universe. Here we investigate the case of a radiation-dominated universe, which is more relevant cosmologically, by using numerical simulations in order to find the initial mass of a black hole as a function of the wall size at the end of inflation. For large supercritical domain walls, this mass nearly saturates the upper bound according to which the black hole cannot be larger than the cosmological horizon. We also find that the subsequent accretion of radiation satisfies a scaling relation, resulting in a mass increase by about a factor of 2.

• OSTI ID: 22679891
• Journal Information: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Journal Issue: 04 Vol. 2017; ISSN 1475-7516
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ASTROPHYSICS
BLACK HOLES
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COSMOLOGICAL INFLATION
COSMOLOGICAL MODELS
DISTRIBUTION
FASTENING
GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS
MASS
PHARYNX
SYMMETRY
SYMMETRY BREAKING
UNIVERSE