Speaker
Description
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 through gravitational waves, 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 discuss how recent advances in our understanding of quantum effects in black holes impact PBHs. On the one hand, this concerns deviations from Hawking radiation in the form of the memory-burden effect. On the other hand, I will discuss vorticity, which we recently conjectured to be a new characteristic of (near-extremally rotating) black holes. In the second part of my talk, I will present novel results on large-scale simulations of spatially-correlated random fields, being able to resolve events as rare as one in 10^13, and discuss their application to PBHs. Finally, I will elucidate on the role primordial black holes have on early galaxy and star formation.
