Revealing dark matter dress of primordial black holes by cosmological lensing

Abstract

Stellar-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) from the early Universe can directly contribute to the gravitational wave (GW) events observed by LIGO, but can only comprise a subdominant component of the dark matter (DM). The primary DM constituent will generically form massive halos around seeding stellar-mass PBHs. We demonstrate that gravitational lensing of sources at cosmological (≳Gpc) distances can directly explore DM halo dresses engulfing PBHs, challenging for lensing of local sources in the vicinity of Milky Way. Strong lensing analysis of fast radio bursts detected by CHIME survey already starts to probe parameter space of dressed stellar-mass PBHs, and upcoming searches can efficiently explore dressed PBHs over ∼10−105M⊙ mass-range and provide a stringent test of the PBH scenario for the GW events. Our findings establish a general test for a broad class of DM models with stellar-mass PBHs, including those where QCD axions or WIMP-like particles comprise predominant DM. The results open a new route for exploring dressed PBHs with various types of lensing events at cosmological distances, such as supernovae and caustic crossings.