Primordial black holes from the preheating instability in single-field inflation
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Abstract
After the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around a local\nminimum of its potential and decays into ordinary matter. These oscillations\ntrigger a resonant instability for cosmological perturbations with wavelengths\nthat exit the Hubble radius close to the end of inflation. In this paper, we\nstudy the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) at these enhanced scales.\nWe find that the production mechanism can be so efficient that PBHs\nsubsequently dominate the content of the universe and reheating proceeds from\ntheir evaporation. Observational constraints on the PBH abundance also restrict\nthe duration of the resonant instability phase, leading to tight limits on the\nreheating temperature that we derive. We conclude that the production of PBHs\nduring reheating is a generic and inevitable property of the simplest\ninflationary models, and does not require any fine tuning of the inflationary\npotential.\n