Coexistence Test of Primordial Black Holes and Particle Dark Matter from Diffractive Lensing.

If dark matter (DM) consists of primordial black holes (PBHs) and particles simultaneously, PBHs are generically embedded within particle DM halos. Such "dressed PBHs" (dPBHs) are subject to modified constraints compared to PBHs and can contribute to significant DM abundance in the mass range 10^{-1}-10^{2}M_{⊙}. We show that diffractive lensing of chirping gravitational waves from binary mergers can not only discover, but can also identify dPBH lenses and discriminate them from bare PBHs on the event-by-event basis, with potential to definitively establish the coexistence of subdominant PBHs and particle DM.

Erratum: Search for Cosmic-Ray Boosted Sub-GeV Dark Matter Using Recoil Protons at Super-Kamiokande [Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 031802 (2023)].

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.

Signatures of a High Temperature QCD Transition in the Early Universe.

Beyond-Standard-Model extensions of QCD could result in quark and gluon confinement occurring well above at temperature around the GeV scale. These models can also alter the order of the QCD phase transition. Therefore, the enhanced production of primordial black holes (PBHs) that can accompany the change in relativistic degrees of freedom at the QCD transition could favor the production of PBHs with mass scales smaller than the Standard Model QCD horizon scale.

Enhanced Gravitational Waves from Inflaton Oscillons.

In broad classes of inflationary models the period of accelerated expansion is followed by fragmentation of the inflaton scalar field into localized, long-lived, and massive oscillon excitations. We demonstrate that matter dominance of oscillons, followed by their rapid decay, significantly enhances the primordial gravitational wave (GW) spectrum. These oscillon-induced GWs, sourced by second-order perturbations, are distinct and could be orders of magnitude lower in frequency than the previously considered GWs associated with oscillon formation.