Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from non-canonical inflation

Understand

Primordial black holes (PBHs) can generically form in inflationary setups through the collapse of enhanced cosmological perturbations, providing us access to the early Universe through their associated observational signatures.

• In the current work we propose a new mechanism of PBH production within non-canonical inflation, using a class of steep-deformed inflationary potentials compatible with natural values for the non-canonical exponents.
• In particular, by requiring significant PBH production we extract constraints on the non-canonical exponents.
• Additionally, we find that our scenario can lead to the formation of asteroid-mass PBHs, which can account for the totality of the dark matter, as well as to production of solar-mass PBHs within the LIGO/VIRGO detection band.