Black hole formation from a general quadratic action for inflationary primordial fluctuations

Abstract: The most up to date femto- and micro-lensing constraints indicate that primordial black holes of $\sim 10^{-16} M_\odot$ and $\sim 10^{-12} M_\odot$, respectively, may constitute a large fraction of the dark matter. We describe analytically and numerically the dynamics by which inflationary fluctuations featuring a time-varying propagation speed or an effective Planck mass can lead to abundant primordial black hole production. As an example, we provide an ad hoc DBI-like model. A very large primordial spectrum originating from a small speed of sound typically leads to strong coupling within the vanilla effective theory of inflationary perturbations. However, we point out that ghost inflation may be able to circumvent this problem. We consider as well black hole formation in solid inflation, for which, in addition to an analogous difficulty, we stress the importance of the reheating process. In addition, we review the basic formalism for the collapse of large radiation density fluctuations, emphasizing the relevance of an adequate choice of gauge invariant variables.