Supermassive black holes triggered by QCD axion bubbles

Abstract

Abstract  Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are ubiquitous in the center of galaxies, although the origin of their massive seeds is still unknown. In this paper, we investigate the formation of SMBHs from the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion bubbles. In this case, primordial black holes (PBHs) are considered as the seeds of SMBHs, which are generated from the QCD axion bubbles due to an explicit Peccei–Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking after inflation. The QCD axion bubbles are formed when the QCD axion starts to oscillate during the QCD phase transition. We consider a general case in which the axion bubbles are formed with the bubble effective angle θ eff ∈ (0, π], leading to the minimum PBH mass ∼ O ( 10 4 − 10 7 ) M ⊙ for the axion decay constant f a ∼ O ( 10 16 ) GeV . The PBHs at this mass region may account for the seeds of SMBHs.