Simulations of PBH formation at the QCD epoch and comparison with the GWTC-3 catalog

Understand

The probability of primordial black hole (PBH) formation is known to be boosted during the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) crossover due to a slight reduction of the equation of state.

• This induces a high peak and other features in the PBH mass distribution.
• But the impact of this variation during the PBH formation has been so far neglected.
• In this work we simulate for the first time the formation of PBHs by taking into account the varying equation of state at the QCD epoch, compute the over-density threshold using different curvature profiles and find that the resulting PBH mass distributions are significantly impacted.