This is a review article on the primordial black holes (PBHs), with particular focus on the massive ones ( 10 15 g) which have not evaporated by the present epoch by the Hawking radiation. By the detections of gravitational waves by LIGO, we have gained a completely novel tool to observationally search for PBHs complementary to the electromagnetic waves. Based on the perspective that gravitational-wave astronomy will make a significant progress in the next decades, a purpose of this article is to give a comprehensive review covering a wide range of topics on PBHs. After discussing PBH formation as well as several inflation models leading to PBH production, we summarize various existing and future observational constraints. We then present topics on formation of PBH binaries, gravitational waves from PBH binaries, various observational tests of PBHs by using gravitational waves.

We point out that the gravitational-wave event GW150914 observed by the LIGO detectors can be explained by the coalescence of primordial black holes (PBHs). It is found that the expected PBH merger rate would exceed the rate estimated by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration if PBHs were the dominant component of dark matter, while it can be made compatible if PBHs constitute a fraction of dark matter. Intriguingly, the abundance of PBHs required to explain the suggested lower bound on the event rate, >2  events  Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}, roughly coincides with the existing upper limit set by the nondetection of the cosmic microwave background spectral distortion. This implies that the proposed PBH scenario may be tested in the not-too-distant future.

Ultra slow-roll inflation has recently been used to challenge the non-Gaussianity consistency relation. We show that this inflationary scenario belongs to a one parameter class of models and we study its properties and observational predictions. We demonstrate that the power spectrum remains scale-invariant and that the bi-spectrum is of the local type with f NL = 5(3 − n S )/4 which, indeed, represents a modification of the consistency relation. However, we also show that the system is unstable and suffers from many physical problems among which is the difficulty to correctly WMAP normalize the model. We conclude that ultra slow-roll inflation remains a very peculiar case, the physical relevance of which is probably not sufficient to call into question the validity of the consistency relation.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.061101.

We investigate the non-Gaussianity of primordial curvature perturbation in the modulated reheating scenario where the primordial perturbation is generated due to the spacial fluctuation of the inflaton decay rate to radiation. We use the $\delta N$ formalism to evaluate the trispectrum of curvature perturbation as well as its bispectrum. We give expressions for three non-linear parameters $f_{NL}, \tau_{NL}$ and $g_{NL}$ in the modulated reheating scenario. If the intrinsic non-Gaussianity of scalar field fluctuations and third derivative of the decay rate with respect to scalar fields are negligibly small, $g_{NL}$ has at least the same order of magnitude as $f_{NL}$. We also give general inequality between $f_{NL}$ and $\tau_{NL}$ which is true for other inflationary scenarios as long as primordial non-Gaussianity comes from super-horizon evolution.Comment: references adde

In the context of classical mechanics, we study the conditions under which higher-order derivative theories can evade the so-called Ostrogradsky instability. More precisely, we consider general Lagrangians with second order time derivatives, of the form L(φ a ,φ a , φ a ;q i , q i ) with a = 1, · · · , n and i = 1, · · · , m. For n = 1, assuming that the q i 's form a nondegenerate subsystem, we confirm that the degeneracy of the kinetic matrix eliminates the Ostrogradsky instability. The degeneracy implies, in the Hamiltonian formulation of the theory, the existence of a primary constraint, which generates a secondary constraint, thus eliminating the Ostrogradsky ghost. For n > 1, we show that, in addition to the degeneracy of the kinetic matrix, one needs to impose extra conditions to ensure the presence of a sufficient number of secondary constraints that can eliminate all the Ostrogradsky ghosts. When these conditions that ensure the disappearance of the Ostrogradsky instability are satisfied, we show that the Euler-Lagrange equations, which involve a priori higher order derivatives, can be reduced to a second order system.

We investigate non-Gaussianity in the modulated reheating scenario where fluctuations of the decay rate of the inflaton generate adiabatic perturbations, paying particular attention to the non-linearity parameters f NL , τ NL and g NL as well as the scalar spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio which characterize the nature of the primordial power spectrum. We also take into account the pre-existing adiabatic perturbations produced from the inflaton fluctuations. It has been known that the non-linearity between the curvature perturbations and the fluctuations of the decay rate can yield non-Gaussianity at the level of f NL ∼ O(1), but we find that the non-linearity between the decay rate and the modulus field which determines the decay rate can generate much greater non-Gaussianity. We also discuss a consistency relation among non-linearity parameters which holds in the scenario and find that the modulated reheating yields a different one from that of the curvaton model. In particular, they both can yield a large positive f NL but with a different sign of g NL . This provides a possibility to discriminate these two competitive models by looking at the sign of g NL . Furthermore, we work on some concrete inflation models and investigate in what cases models predict the spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio allowed by the current data while generating large non-Gaussianity, which may have many implications for model-buildings of the inflationary universe.

We perform a fully relativistic analysis of even-parity linear perturbations around a static and spherically symmetric solution in the most general scalar-tensor theory with second-order field equations. This paper is a sequel to Kobayashi et al. [Phys. Rev. D 85, 084025 (2012)], in which the linear perturbation analysis for the odd-parity modes is presented. Expanding the Horndeski action to second order in perturbations and eliminating auxiliary variables, we derive the quadratic action for even-parity perturbations written solely in terms of two dynamical variables. The two perturbations can be interpreted as the gravitational and scalar waves. Correspondingly, we obtain two conditions to evade ghosts and two conditions for the absence of gradient instabilities. Only one in each pair of conditions yields a new stability criterion, as the conditions derived from the stability of the gravitational-wave degree of freedom coincide with those in the odd-parity sector. Similarly, the propagation speed of one of the two modes is the same as that for the odd-parity mode, while the other differs in general from them. Our result is applicable to all the theories of gravitation with an extra single scalar degree of freedom such as the Brans-Dicke theory, f (R) models, and Galileon gravity.