Primordial Black Holes from Multifield Inflation with Nonminimal Couplings

Understand

Primordial black holes (PBHs) provide an exciting prospect for accounting for dark matter.

• In this paper, we consider inflationary models that incorporate realistic features from high-energy physics -- including multiple interacting scalar fields and nonminimal couplings to the spacetime Ricci scalar -- that could produce PBHs with masses in the range required to address the present-day dark matter abundance.
• Such models are consistent with supersymmetric constructions, and only incorporate operators in the effective action that would be expected from generic effective field theory considerations.
• The models feature potentials with smooth large-field plateaus together with small-field features that can induce a brief phase of ultra-slow-roll evolution.