Primordial black holes and smooth coarse-graining in excursion set theory

Abstract The excursion-set formalism enables us to infer the mass distribution of collapsed objects, such as primordial black holes (PBHs), by the language of stochastic processes. Within the framework, this article investigates how a smooth coarse-graining procedure affects the resulting PBH mass function. As a demonstrative example, we employ a Gaussian window function, for which the stochastic noise becomes fully correlated across scales. It is found that these correlated noises result in a mass function of PBHs, whose maximum and its neighbourhood are predominantly determined by the probability that the density contrast exceeds a given threshold at each mass scale. Our results clarify the role of noise correlations induced by smooth coarse-graining and highlight their importance in predicting the abundance of PBHs.