Intermediate Mass Black Hole Seeds from Cosmic String Loops
  We demonstrate that cosmic string loops may provide a joint resolution of two
mysteries surrounding recently observed black holes. For a string tension in an
appropriate range, large radius string loops have the potential to provide the
nonlinearities in the early universe which seed supermassive black holes. The
more numerous smaller radius string loops can then seed intermediate mass black
holes, including those with a mass in the region between 65 and 135 solar
masses in which standard black hole formation scenarios predict no black holes
are able to form, but which have recently been detected by the LIGO/VIRGO
collaboration. We find that there could be as many as $10^6$ of intermediate
mass black holes per galaxy, providing a tantalizing target for gravitational
wave observatories to look for.
