Primordial seeds of supermassive black holes

Supermassive black holes exist in the centers of galaxies, including Milky Way, but there is no compelling theory of their formation. Furthermore, observations of quasars imply that supermassive black holes have already existed at some very high redshifts, suggesting the possibility of their primordial origin. In a class of well-motivated models, inflationary epoch could include two or more periods of inflation dominated by different scalar fields. The transition between such periods of inflation could enhance the spectrum of density perturbations on some specific scale, which could lead to formation of primordial black holes with a very narrow range of masses of the order of 10(5) solar masses. These primordial black holes could have provided the requisite seeds for the observed population of supermassive black holes. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.