Primordial Black Hole production in Critical Higgs Inflation

Understand

Primordial Black Holes (PBH) arise naturally from high peaks in the curvature power spectrum of near-inflection-point single-field inflation, and could constitute today the dominant component of the dark matter in the universe.

• In this letter we explore the possibility that a broad spectrum of PBH is formed in models of Critical Higgs Inflation (CHI), where the near-inflection point is related to the critical value of the RGE running of both the Higgs self-coupling $\lambda(\mu)$ and its non-minimal coupling to gravity $\xi(\mu)$.
• We show that, for a wide range of model parameters, a half-domed-shaped peak in the matter spectrum arises at sufficiently small scales that it passes all the constraints from large scale structure observations.
• The predicted cosmic microwave background spectrum at large scales is in agreement with Planck 2015 data, and has a relatively large tensor-to-scalar ratio that may soon be detected by B-mode polarization experiments.