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  • Open Access

Probing light primordial black holes through noncold dark matter

Yu-Ming Chen*

  • *Contact author: yumingchen@cmail.carleton.ca
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 063013 – Published 5 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xrsg-63pq

Abstract

We study the matter power spectrum constraint on primordial black holes (PBHs) by the dark matter (DM) emitted through Hawking radiation. We particularly focus on the scenario where a PBH, with mass ranges between 1 g and 109  g, evaporates before big bang nucleosynthesis. In addition to that, we consider the case where PBH abundance is scarce and there is no early PBH domination taking place. On the DM side, we assume a fraction of the population is produced from PBH evaporation, while the remaining part is the regular cold dark matter, which is produced by some genesis processes that decouples later on. Therefore, in the rest of the cosmological history, DM interacts solely through gravity. Under this condition, there is no thermal equilibrium ever established between DM and standard model plasma. An important feature in our analysis is that, for the light PBH we consider, its temperature is much larger than the mass of DM, which is consequently produced ultrarelativistically and requires a protracted time to become matterlike. In this context, even though a PBH evaporates in the very early Universe, PBH-produced DM could still be energetic and smooth out the small scale structure at a much later time. By the precision measurement on the matter power spectrum from cosmic surveys, we are able to set a joint constraint on light PBHs and the noncold DMs they produced.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 063013– Published 5 March, 2026
  • Received 24 October 2025
  • Accepted 18 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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