Primordial black holes as a probe of strongly first-order electroweak phase transition

Primordial black holes can be produced by density fluctuations generated from delayed vacuum decays of first-order phase transition. The primordial black holes generated at the electroweak phase transition have masses of about 10(-5) solar mass. Such primordial black holes in the mass range can be tested by current and future microlensing observations, such as Subaru HSC, OGLE, PRIME and Roman telescope. Therefore, we may be able to explore new physics models with strongly first-order electroweak phase transition via primordial black holes. We examine this possibility by using models with first-order electroweak phase transition in the standard model effective field theory with dimension 6 and 8 operators. We find that depending on parameters of the phase transition a sufficient number of primordial black holes can be produced to be observed by above mentioned experiments. Our results would suggest that primordial black holes can be used as a new probe of models with strongly first-order electroweak phase transition, which has complementarity with measurements of the triple Higgs boson coupling at future collider experiments and observations of gravitational waves at future space-based interferometers. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This study investigates primordial black holes generated from first-order phase transitions and explores their potential as a probe for models with strongly first-order electroweak phase transition. The results suggest complementarity with future collider experiments and gravitational wave observations.