Primordial Black Holes - Positivist Perspective and Quantum Quiddity

30 Jan 2025
Seminars and colloquia
Time
-
Venue
Beecroft Seminar Room
Beecroft Building, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU
Speaker(s)

Dr Florian Kühnel, Max Planck Inst. Munich and LMU Munich

Seminar series
Dalitz seminar
For more information contact

Abstract

Primordial black holes are black holes that may have formed in the early Universe. Their masses potentially span a range from as low as the Planck mass up to many orders of magnitude above the solar mass. This, in particular, includes those black holes recently discovered by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, and (part of) these may conceivably be of primordial origin. After a general introduction on primordial black holes, I review the observational hints for their existence -- from a variety of lensing, dynamical, accretion and gravitational-wave effects. As I will show, all of these (over 20) may be explained by a single and simple unified model, naturally shaped by the thermal history of the Universe. If time permits, I will comment on vorticity, which we recently conjectured to be a novel feature of (near-extremally rotating) black holes, this possibly yielding the very first astrophysical observable for quantum effects in these compact bodies.