Primordial black holes and curvature perturbations from false vacuum islands

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been focused on the false vacuum islands that are flooded by an expanding ocean of true-vacuum bubbles slightly later than most of the other parts of the world. These delayed decay regions will accumulate locally larger vacuum energy density by staying in the false vacuum longer than those already transited into the true vacuum. A false vacuum island with thus acquired density contrast of a super-horizon size will evolve locally from radiation dominance to vacuum dominance, creating a local baby Universe that can be regarded effectively as a local closed Universe. If such density contrasts of super-horizon sizes can ever grow large enough to exceed the threshold of gravitational collapse, primordial black holes will form similar to those collapsing curvature perturbations on super-horizon scales induced by small-scale enhancements during inflation. If not, such density contrasts can still induce curvature perturbations potentially observable today. In this paper, we revisit and elaborate on the generations of primordial black holes and curvature perturbations from delayed-decayed false vacuum islands during asynchronous first-order phase transitions with fitting formulas convenient for future model-independent studies.