Simulation of primordial black hole formation using pseudo-spectral methods

In this work we have used for the first time pseudo-spectral methods to perform numerical simulations of spherically symmetric black hole formations on a Friedman-Robertson-Walker universe. With these methods, the differential equations describing the gravitational collapse are partially solved algebraically. With our publicly available code we then independently check, and confirm, previous numerical estimations of the thresholds to form primordial black holes. By using an excision technique and analytical estimations of accretion rates, we were also able to estimate the black holes mass even in the case of large deviations from the threshold. There, we confirm, with an explicit example, that the estimation of the black hole mass via the self-similar scaling law is only accurate up to O(15%), for the largest allowed mass. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.