Hypothesis of primordial black hole creation in the early Universe was formulated by Ya.B. Zeldovich and I.D. Novikov in 1966 (the text of this pioneering article is provided in Appendix to this review). In the recent years this hypothesis becomes extremely heightened and popular. Modern astronomical data in the electromagnetic spectrum and also observation of gravitational waves and cosmic neutrino reveal the series unique astrophysical phenomena, which may be directly related with primordial black holes, created before the formation of first stars. This review is devoted to description of different models of primordial black holes formation and also to elucidation the astronomical and astrophysical methods for a verification of primordial black hole models. In particular, we describe in details the formation of primordial black holes and their clusters during gravitational collapse of the so called domain walls in the early Universe with additional space-time dimensions.

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Correspondence should be addressed to Keywords: black holes, primordial black holes, cosmology, universe, gravitation PACS: 04.20.−q, 04.30.−w, 04.30.Tv, 04.70.−s, 04.70.Bw (all) DOI: 10.3367/UFNe.2026.07.040164 URL: https://ufn.ru/en/articles/2026/10/b/ Citation: Dokuchaev V I, Eroshenko Yu N, Nikulin V V, Postnov K A, Rubin S G, Stasenko V D "Primordial black holes" Phys. Usp. 69 (10) (2026) Received: 23rd, June 2026, accepted: 17th, July 2026 Оригинал: Докучаев В И, Ерошенко Ю Н, Никулин В В, Постнов К А, Рубин С Г, Стасенко В Д «Первичные чёрные дыры» УФН 196 1011–1054 (2026); DOI: 10.3367/UFNr.2026.07.040164 Ya.B. Zel’dovich and I.D. Novikov are authors of Physics-Uspekhi