Lensing by primordial black holes: constraints from gravitational wave observations

2021/08/27 by J. S. Wang, Jie-Shuang Wang, Antonio Herrera-Martín +2 · 18 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Binary black hole #Binary number #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark matter #Einstein Telescope #Galaxy #Gravitational lens #Gravitational wave #LIGO #Particle physics #Physics #Primordial black hole #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Redshift #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.083515

published in arXiv (Cornell University) 104(8) (Cornell University) · 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. D

arxiv created 2021/08/27 · openalex publication_date 2021/08/27 · openalex created_date 2021/10/11 · arxiv updated 2021/10/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) have been proposed to explain at least a portion of dark matter. Observations have put strong constraints on PBHs in terms of the fraction of dark matter which they can represent, f_{\rm PBH}, across a wide mass range -- apart from the stellar-mass range of 20M_\odot\lesssim M_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 100M_\odot. In this paper, we explore the possibility that such PBHs could serve as point-mass lenses capable of altering the gravitational-wave (GW) signals observed from binary black hole (BBH) mergers along their line-of-sight. We find that careful GW data analysis could verify the existence of such PBHs based on the fitting~factor and odds ratio analyses. When such a lensed GW signal is detected, we expect to be able to measure the redshifted mass of the lens with a relative error Δ M_{\rm PBH}/M_{\rm PBH}\lesssim0.3. If no such lensed GW events were detected despite the operation of sensitive GW detectors accumulating large numbers of BBH mergers, it would translate into a stringent constraint of f_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 10^-2-10^-5 for PBHs with a mass larger than ∼10M_\odot by the Einstein Telescope after one year of running, and f_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 0.2 for PBHs with mass greater than ∼ 50M_\odot for advanced LIGO after ten years of running.

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