On the orbital eccentricities of primordial black hole binaries inside and outside of dark matter halos
Muhsin Aljaf, Ilias Cholis
astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-07-26
Comments: 14 pages,10 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Primordial black hole (PBH) binaries in the stellar mass range may still contribute a fraction of the detectable compact object binaries by LIGO and future GW observatories.
Terminology
Abstract
Primordial black hole (PBH) binaries in the stellar mass range may still contribute a fraction of the detectable compact object binaries by LIGO and future GW observatories. PBH binaries at formation typically have very high eccentricities. In this paper, we study the eccentricity of stellar mass range PBH binaries from all formation channels and account for all evolutionary pathways. We simulate large samples of PBH binaries, tracking their full orbital evolution up to their merger or to the present day. For those that merge, we compute their GW strain, detectability, and eccentricity distributions for LISA, DECIGO, ET, CE, and aLIGO. We find that PBH binaries that evolve in isolation completely circularize by the time their GWs enter any GW band except for LISA's, where residual eccentricities of order O(10-2) can exist. Binaries that become part of dark matter halos can have multiple binary-single interactions with other PBHs, especially if they reside in the more dense environments among them and can have higher eccentricities even at their late inspiral phase, probed by the GW observatories. Considering the current limits on the abundance of stellar mass range PBHs, we predict that LISA and DECIGO together would be able to probe O(10 2) such binaries with e>0.01. If these future GW observatories in space can exclude such eccentric binaries, then limits on the PBH abundance can be improved by an order of magnitude.
Sources
- Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter
- Primordial black hole constraints for extended mass functions
- Constraints on Primordial Black Holes
- Primordial Black Hole Scenario for the Gravitational-Wave Event GW150914
- The merger rate of primordial-black-hole binaries
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
- Did LIGO detect dark matter?
- Primordial Black Holes - Perspectives in Gravitational Wave Astronomy -
- Black Holes' Dark Dress: On the merger rate of a subdominant population of primordial black holes
- Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes
- Constraints on primordial black holes from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O3 events
- Conservative limits on primordial black holes from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observations
- Binary Black Holes population synthesis based on the current LVK observations
- MACHO Project Limits on Black Hole Dark Matter in the 1-30 Solar Mass Range
- Limits on the Macho Content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds
- Effect of Primordial Black Holes on the Cosmic Microwave Background and Cosmological Parameter Estimates
- The end of the MACHO era- revisited: new limits on MACHO masses from halo wide binaries
- Constraint on the abundance of primordial black holes in dark matter from Planck data
- Cosmic microwave background limits on accreting primordial black holes
- Constraints on MACHO Dark Matter from Compact Stellar Systems in Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies
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