Primordial Black Holes from Supercooled Phase Transitions

Abstract

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. Patches which percolate the latest undergo the longest vacuum-domination stage and as a consequence develop large over-densities triggering their collapse into primordial black holes (PBHs). We derive an analytical approximation for the probability of a patch to collapse into a PBH as a function of the 1stOPT duration, $\beta^{-1}$, and deduce the expected PBH abundance. We find that 1stOPTs which take more than $15\%$ of a Hubble time to complete ($\beta/H \lesssim 7$) produce observable PBHs. Their abundance is independent of the duration of the supercooling phase, in agreement with the de Sitter no hair conjecture.