• Open Access

Lyman-α Forest Constraints on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter

Riccardo Murgia, Giulio Scelfo, Matteo Viel, and Alvise Raccanelli
Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 071102 – Published 16 August 2019

Abstract

The renewed interest in the possibility that primordial black holes (PBHs) may constitute a significant part of dark matter has provided motivation for revisiting old observational constraints, as well as developing new ones. We present new limits on the PBH abundance, from a comprehensive analysis of high-resolution high-redshift Lyman-α forest data. Poisson fluctuations in the PBH number density induce a small-scale power enhancement which departs from the standard cold dark matter prediction. Using a grid of hydrodynamic simulations exploring different values of astrophysical parameters, we obtain a marginalized upper limit on the PBH mass of fPBHMPBH60M at 2σ, when a Gaussian prior on the reionization redshift is imposed, preventing its posterior distribution from peaking on very high values, which are disfavored by the most recent estimates obtained both through cosmic microwave background and intergalactic medium observations. Such a bound weakens to fPBHMPBH170M when a conservative flat prior is instead assumed. Both limits significantly improve on previous constraints from the same physical observable. We also extend our predictions to nonmonochromatic PBH mass distributions, ruling out large regions of the parameter space for some of the most viable PBH extended mass functions.

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  • Received 1 April 2019
  • Revised 6 June 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.071102

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Riccardo Murgia1,2,3, Giulio Scelfo1,2,3, Matteo Viel1,2,3,4, and Alvise Raccanelli5

  • 1SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy
  • 2INFN, Sez. di Trieste, via Valerio 2, 34127 Trieste, Italy
  • 3IFPU, Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, via Beirut 2, 34151 Trieste, Italy
  • 4INAF/OATS, Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, via Tiepolo 11, I-34143 Trieste, Italy
  • 5Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1 Esplanade des Particules, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

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Issue

Vol. 123, Iss. 7 — 16 August 2019

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