Speaker
Frederik Depta
Description
In this talk I evaluate whether the gravitational wave background for which a number of different pulsar timing arrays recently found evidence could be due to merging primordial supermassive black hole binaries. I find that for homogeneously distributed primordial black holes this possibility is inconsistent with strong cosmological and astrophysical constraints on their total abundance. If the distribution exhibits some clustering, however, the merger rate will in general be enhanced, opening the window for a consistent interpretation of the PTA data in terms of merging primordial black holes.
