A novel formulation of the primordial black hole mass function

Abstract

Computations of the primordial black hole (PBH) mass function discussed in the literature have conceptual issues. They stem from the fact that the mass function is a differential quantity and the standard criterion of the PBH formation from the seed primordial fluctuations cannot be directly applied to the computation of the differential quantities. We propose a new criterion of the PBH formation, which is the addition of one extra condition to the existing one. By doing this, we derive a formal expression of the PBH mass function without introducing any ambiguous interpretations that exist in the previous studies. Once the underlying primordial fluctuations are specified, the PBH mass function can be in principle determined by the new formula. As a demonstration of our formulation, we compute the PBH mass function analytically for the case where the perturbations are Gaussian and the space is 1 dimension.