Primordial Black Holes from Supercooled Phase Transitions

Understand

Cosmological first-order phase transitions (1stOPTs) are said to be strongly supercooled when the nucleation temperature is much smaller than the critical temperature.

• These are often encountered in theories that admit a nearly scale-invariant potential, for which the bounce action decreases only logarithmically with temperature.
• During supercooled 1stOPTs the equation of state of the universe undergoes a rapid and drastic change, transitioning from vacuum-domination to radiation-domination.
• The statistical variations in bubble nucleation histories imply that distinct causal patches percolate at slightly different times.