Primordial Black Holes from non-Gaussian tails

Abstract: We develop a primordial black hole (PBH) production mechanism, deriving non-Gaussian tails from interacting quantum fields during early universe inflation. The multi-field potential landscape may contain relatively flat directions, as a result of energetically favorable adjustments of fields coupled to the inflaton. Such additional fields do not contribute to CMB fluctuations given a sufficient large-scale decay, related to a gap in the critical exponents computed using stochastic methods. Along such directions transverse to the inflaton, the field makes rare jumps to large values. Mixing with the inflaton leads to a substantial tail in the resulting probability distribution for the primordial perturbations. Incorporating a large number of flavors of fields ensures theoretical control of radiative corrections and a substantial abundance. This generates significant PBH production for a reasonable window of parameters, with the mass range determined by the time period of mixing and the inflationary Hubble scale. We analyze a particular model in detail, and then comment on a broader family of models in this class which suggests a mechanism for primordial seeds for early super-massive black holes in the universe. Along the way, we encounter an analytically tractable example of stochastic dynamics and provide some representative calculations of its correlations and probability distributions.