https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14840-4
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Primordial black holes and scalar induced gravitational waves from sound speed resonance in non-minimal derivative coupling inflation model
1
College of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Hainan Normal University, 571158, Haikou, People’s Republic of China
2
College of Physics and Engineering Technology, Chengdu Normal University, 611130, Chengdu, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China
3
Department of Physics and Synergetic Innovation Center for Quantum Effects and Applications, Hunan Normal University, 410081, Changsha, Hunan, People’s Republic of China
Received:
28
February
2025
Accepted:
23
September
2025
Published online:
10
October
2025
We investigate an inflationary model with a non-minimal derivative coupling, where the coupling function contains both constant and periodic components. On large scales, the model is in excellent agreement with the latest Planck-ACT-LiteBIRD-BICEP/Keck 2018 (P-ACT-LB-BK18) observations. On small scales, the periodic component induces a sound-speed resonance mechanism that significantly amplifies curvature perturbations, resulting in the production of primordial black holes (PBHs). By incorporating nonlinear effects in the PBH abundance calculation, we find that the resulting PBHs can account for the majority of dark matter in the Universe. Furthermore, the PBH formation process generates scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) with a characteristic multi-peak spectral shape, which may be detectable by future space-based detectors such as LISA, Taiji, and TianQin. The model also predicts a high-frequency stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) from PBH binary mergers. A combined detection of SIGWs and high-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) in future experiments would provide a direct and testable probe of this inflationary scenario.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funded by SCOAP3.
