Ellipsoidal collapse and primordial black hole formation

We reinvestigate gravitational ellipsoidal collapse with special focus on its impact on primordial black hole formation. We start with the results for the collapse threshold in the case of ellipsoidal collapse in the context of structure formation, and show heuristically that a similar functional form for the threshold should be expected in the case of primordial black hole formation. For a generic model we apply this to demonstrate that the abundance and energy density of the produced primordial black holes can be significantly decreased when the nonsphericity of the overdensities is taken into account. Further numerical study of this phenomenon may be crucial in order to produce reliable predictions for primordial black hole abundances from inflationary models.