Speaker
Description
We investigate Hawking evaporation of a population of primordial black holes (PBHs) prior to
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) as a mechanism to achieve asymmetric reheating of two sectors
coupled solely by gravity. While the visible sector is reheated by the inflaton or a modulus, the dark
sector is reheated by PBHs. Compared to inflationary or modular reheating of both sectors, there
are two advantages: (i) inflaton or moduli mediated operators that can subsequently thermalize the
dark sector with the visible sector are not relevant to the asymmetric reheating process; (ii) the
mass and abundance of the PBHs provide parametric control of the thermal history of the dark
sector, and in particular the ratio of the temperatures of the two sectors. Asymmetric reheating
with PBHs turns out to have a particularly rich dark sector phenomenology, which we explore using
a single self-interacting real scalar field in the dark sector as a template
