Correlation function of high-threshold regions and application to the initial small-scale clustering of primordial black holes

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) have been brought back into the spotlight by LIGO's first direct detection of a binary-black-hole merger. One of the poorly understood properties of PBHs is how clustered they are at formation. It has important implications on the efficacy of their merging in the early Universe, as well as on observational constraints. In this work we study the initial clustering of PBHs formed from the gravitational collapse of large density fluctuations in the early Universe. We give a simple and general argument showing that, in this scenario, we do not expect clustering on very small scales beyond what is expected from a random, Poisson distribution. We illustrate this result explicitly in the case where the underlying density field is Gaussian. We moreover derive a new analytic expression for the two-point correlation function of large-threshold fluctuations, generalizing previous results to arbitrary separation, and with broader implications than the clustering of PBHs.