The Detected Stochastic Gravitational Waves and Subsolar-Mass Primordial Black Holes

Abstract

Multiple pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations recently announced the evidence of common-spectral processes caused by gravitational waves (GWs). These can be the stochastic GW background and its origin may be astrophysical and/or cosmological. We interpret it as the GWs induced by the primordial curvature perturbations and discuss their implications on primordial black holes (PBHs). We show that the newly released data suggest PBHs much lighter than the Sun ($\mathcal{O}(10^{-4}) \, M_\odot$ for the delta-function curvature spectrum; $< \mathcal{O}(10^{-2})\, M_\odot$ more generally) in contrast to what was expected from the previous PTA data releases.