Description
Primordial black holes (PBHs) can form from the collapse of large cosmological perturbations in the early Universe. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in our understanding of PBH formation in different cosmological scenarios, including the radiation-dominated era, the electroweak and QCD phase transitions, and phases dominated by a massless scalar field. The resulting PBH population can span a broad range of masses, making PBHs compelling candidates for dark matter, potential sources of gravitational waves from binary mergers in the lower mass gap, and possible progenitors of the supermassive black holes observed at high redshift.