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Near future MeV telescopes can discover asteroid-mass primordial black hole dark matter

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arxiv 2102.06714 v2 pith:AU7OIGJS submitted 2021-02-12 astro-ph.CO astro-ph.HEhep-exhep-ph

Near future MeV telescopes can discover asteroid-mass primordial black hole dark matter

classification astro-ph.CO astro-ph.HEhep-exhep-ph
keywords pbhsamegomassmassesasteroid-massblackcandidatecurrent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Primordial black holes (PBHs), formed out of large overdensities in the early Universe, are a viable dark matter (DM) candidate over a broad range of masses. Ultra-light, asteroid-mass PBHs with masses around $10^{17}$ g are particularly interesting as current observations allow them to constitute the entire DM density. PBHs in this mass range emit $\sim$ MeV photons via Hawking radiation which can directly be detected by the gamma ray telescopes, such as the upcoming AMEGO. In this work we forecast how well an instrument with the sensitivity of AMEGO will be able to detect, or rule out, PBHs as a DM candidate, by searching for their evaporating signature when marginalizing over the Galactic and extra-Galactic gamma-ray backgrounds. We find that an instrument with the sensitivity of AMEGO could exclude non-rotating PBHs as the only DM component for masses up to $7 \times 10^{17}$ g at 95% confidence level (C.L.) for a monochromatic mass distribution, improving upon current bounds by nearly an order of magnitude. The forecasted constraints are more stringent for PBHs that have rotation, or which follow extended mass distributions.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Primordial black holes as cosmic accelerators of light dark matter: Novel direct detection constraints

    hep-ph 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Primordial black hole evaporation generates light fermionic dark matter capable of producing electron recoils in XENONnT, LZ, and PandaX-4T, enabling new constraints on DM-electron interactions after including Earth a...

  2. Primordial Black Hole from Tensor-induced Density Fluctuation: First-order Phase Transitions and Domain Walls

    astro-ph.CO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Tensor perturbations from first-order phase transitions and domain wall annihilation induce curvature fluctuations at second order that form primordial black holes, allowing asteroid-mass PBHs to comprise all dark mat...

  3. $\tt BlackHawk$ $\tt v3.0$: Hawking Radiation from Regular Black Holes

    gr-qc 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    BlackHawk v3.0 adds Hawking temperatures and greybody factors for multiple regular black hole metrics to an existing public code via numerical routines.

  4. Hunting Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter in the MeV Gap

    hep-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Future MeV telescopes are projected to improve existing limits on sterile neutrino dark matter decay rates by several orders of magnitude.

  5. Limits on primordial black holes from the extragalactic gamma-ray background; current status and future projections

    astro-ph.HE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Sets upper limits on primordial black hole dark matter fraction using extragalactic gamma-ray background, claiming these are the tightest indirect constraints for the mass range.