Searching for primordial black hole evaporation signal with AMON

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are expected to gradually evaporate and then explode violently during the last few seconds of their lives, each one producing a burst of high energy particles. For PBHs evaporating near the Sun (r 1 pc), these particles could be detected in coincidence by several observatories with large fields of view, such as IceCube (neutrinos), HAWC (gamma rays) and Pierre Auger (gamma rays, neutrons and protons). The short temporal structure of the anticipated PBH evaporation signal provides a very low false positive rate for any possible detection. We will present the discovery potential of the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) for PBH evaporation events. AMON aims to discover multimessenger transient sources by performing real-time and archival coincidence searches from multiple observatory subthreshold data streams. In this approach, a distinctive PBH evaporation signature may be probed by conducting coincidence analysis from a few years of subthreshold neutrino, gamma-ray and cosmic ray data. Detection of PBH evaporation events would be a scientific breakthrough confirming Hawking's hypothesis of black hole radiation and cosmological models of phase transitions, and would allow us to probe physics at the highest energy scale as well as quantum gravity. : 95.85.Pw, 95.85.Ry, 04.70.Dy PACS

Primordial extremal black holes as dark matter

“…Other than searching for only high-energy neutrinos or only gamma rays, one could also use the multi-messenger approach to search for coincident cosmic ray events by several telescopes: IceCube, ANITA, NuMoon, HAWC, CTA, Fermi-LAT [39,40], Pierre Auger [41], and others [42,43]. This would be a particularly powerful discovery channel that can discriminate against other highenergy backgrounds and allow us to directly detect Hawking radiation.…”

Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON): Science, Infrastructure, and Status

“…Neutrino/Gamma-Ray/Cosmic Ray -An example of an AMON-brokered multimessenger coincidence search is the analysis of neutrino data from IceCube, gamma-ray data from HAWC and cosmic ray data from the Pierre Auger Observatory, the aim of which is to search for a distinctive primordial black hole (PBH) evaporation signature [14]. Detection of PBHs would be a scientific breakthrough confirming Hawking's hypothesis of black hole radiation and cosmological models of phase transitions, and would allow us to probe physics at the highest energy scale.…”

Multimessenger search for evaporating primordial black holes

“…3 Multimessenger search for PBH evaporation signal with AMON [14] Most evaporation models predict, after stage of gradual evaporation, an explosion of PBHs during the last few seconds of their lives. A burst of high energy particles is produced as a result of the explosion.…”

“…Different kinds of these particles could be registered in coincidence by several detectors with large fields of view. The search for such events has been proposed within the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) framework [14]. The discovery potential for joint detections of multimessenger bursts due to evaporating PBHs has examined for IceCube (neutrinos), HAWC (gamma rays) and Pierre Auger (gamma rays, neutrons and protons).…”