Excursion Set Approach to Primordial Black Holes: Cloud-in-Cloud and Mass Function Revisited

Abstract: The abundance and mass function of primordial black holes (PBHs) are often estimated using the Press-Schechter (PS) formalism. In the case of halo formation, the PS formalism suffers from the miscounting of regions collapsing into halos, known as the cloud-in-cloud problem, which is usually corrected by introducing a multiplicative `fudge factor 2'. By analogy, this factor has sometimes been applied to PBH calculations, although its validity has remained unsettled. We reformulate the PS approach for PBHs within the excursion-set framework, where the smoothed density contrast undergoes a stochastic random walk as the smoothing scale varies and collapse is identified with the first threshold crossing. While the halo case is described by a Markovian process, we show that the PBH case is non-Markovian, even when the sharp-k filter Window function is adopted. Decomposing the total collapse probability into two distinct components of the stochastic motion, we numerically confirm that their contributions are exactly equal in the case of halo formation, justifying the fudge factor. For PBHs, however, we demonstrate that this equality no longer holds, and consistent inclusion of both contributions is essential to ensure a positive-definite mass function. Our results clarify the origin of the ambiguity surrounding the fudge factor and establish a robust theoretical foundation for PBH abundance calculations.