Density perturbations and black hole formation in hybrid inflation

Grand unification scale primordial black holes: consequences and constraints

A population of very light primordial black holes which evaporate before nucleosynthesis begins is unconstrained unless the decaying black holes leave stable relics. We show that gravitons Hawking radiated from these black holes would source a substantial stochastic background of high frequency gravititational waves (10(12) Hz or more) in the present Universe. These black holes may lead to a transient period of matter-dominated expansion. In this case the primordial Universe could be temporarily dominated by large clusters of "Hawking stars" and the resulting gravitational wave spectrum is independent of the initial number density of primordial black holes.

Gravitational-wave background as a probe of the primordial black-hole abundance

The formation of a significant number of black holes (PBHs) is realized if and only if primordial density fluctuations have a large amplitude, which means that tensor perturbations generated from these scalar perturbations as a second-order effect are also large and comparable to the observational data. We show that pulsar timing data essentially rule out PBHs with 10;{2}-10;{4}M_{middle dot in circle}, which were previously considered as a candidate of intermediate-mass black holes, and that PBHs with a mass range of 10;{20} to 10;{26} g, which serves as a candidate of dark matter, may be probed by future space-based laser interferometers and atomic interferometers.

Complex hybrid inflation and baryogenesis

We propose a hybrid inflation model with a complex waterfall field which contains an interaction term that breaks the U(1) global symmetry associated with the waterfall field charge. We show that the asymmetric evolution of the real and imaginary parts of the complex field during the phase transition at the end of inflation translates into a charge asymmetry. The latter strongly depends on the vacuum expectation value of the waterfall field, which is well constrained by diverse cosmological observations.