No Arabic abstract
Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are black holes that may have been created in the early Universe and could be as large as supermassive black holes or as small as the Planck scale. It is believed that a black hole has a temperature inversely proportional to its mass and will thermally emit all species of fundamental particles. PBHs with initial masses of 5.0 x 10^14 g should be expiring today with bursts of high-energy gamma radiation in the GeV/TeV energy range. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is sensitive to the high end of the PBH gamma-ray burst spectrum. Due to its large field of view, duty cycle above 90% and sensitivity up to 100 TeV, the HAWC observatory is well suited to perform a search for PBH bursts. We report that if the PBH explodes within 0.25 light years from Earth and within 26 degrees of zenith, HAWC will have a 95% probability of detecting the PBH burst at the 5 sigma level. Conversely, a null detection from a 2 year or longer HAWC search will set PBH upper limits which are significantly better than the upper limits set by any previous PBH search.
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is a ground-based TeV gamma-ray observatory in the state of Puebla, Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m. Its 22,000 m$^2$ instrumented area, wide field of view ($sim$2 sr), and >95% uptime make it an ideal instrument for discovering gamma-ray burst (GRB) emission at $sim$100 GeV. Such a discovery would provide key information about the origins of prompt GRB emission as well as constraints on extra-galactic background light (EBL) models and the violation of Lorentz invariance. We will present prospects for discovering GRB emission at $sim$100 GeV with a simple, all-sky search algorithm using HAWC data that is most sensitive to short GRBs. The search algorithm presented here can also be used to detect other short transients with timescales and fluxes similar to short GRBs.
We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very high-energy gamma-ray observatory currently under construction in Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m. It will observe atmospheric air showers via the water Cherenkov method. HAWC will consist of 300 large water tanks instrumented with 4 photomultipliers each. HAWC has two data acquisition (DAQ) systems. The main DAQ system reads out coincident signals in the tanks and reconstructs the direction and energy of individual atmospheric showers. The scaler DAQ counts the hits in each photomultiplier tube (PMT) in the detector and searches for a statistical excess over the noise of all PMTs. We show that HAWC has a realistic opportunity to observe the high-energy power law components of GRBs that extend at least up to 30 GeV, as it has been observed by Fermi LAT. The two DAQ systems have an energy threshold that is low enough to observe events similar to GRB 090510 and GRB 090902b with the characteristics observed by Fermi LAT. HAWC will provide information about the high-energy spectra of GRBs which in turn could help to understanding about e-pair attenuation in GRB jets, extragalactic background light absorption, as well as establishing the highest energy to which GRBs accelerate particles.
The detection of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) in the solar neighborhood would have very important implications for GRB phenomenology. The leading theories for cosmological GRBs would not be able to explain such events. The final bursts of evaporating Primordial Black Holes (PBHs), however, would be a natural explanation for local GRBs. We present a novel technique that can constrain the distance to gamma-ray bursts using detections from widely separated, non-imaging spacecraft. This method can determine the actual distance to the burst if it is local. We applied this method to constrain distances to a sample of 36 short duration GRBs detected by the Interplanetary Network (IPN) that show observational properties that are expected from PBH evaporations. These bursts have minimum possible distances in the 10^13-10^18 cm (7-10^5 AU) range, consistent with the expected PBH energetics and with a possible origin in the solar neighborhood, although none of the bursts can be unambiguously demonstrated to be local. Assuming these bursts are real PBH events, we estimate lower limits on the PBH burst evaporation rate in the solar neighborhood.
Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are gravitationally collapsed objects that may have been created by density fluctuations in the early universe and could have arbitrarily small masses down to the Planck scale. Hawking showed that due to quantum effects, a black hole has a temperature inversely proportional to its mass and will emit all species of fundamental particles thermally. PBHs with initial masses of ~5.0 x 10^14 g should be expiring in the present epoch with bursts of high-energy particles, including gamma radiation in the GeV - TeV energy range. The Milagro high energy observatory, which operated from 2000 to 2008, is sensitive to the high end of the PBH evaporation gamma-ray spectrum. Due to its large field-of-view, more than 90% duty cycle and sensitivity up to 100 TeV gamma rays, the Milagro observatory is well suited to perform a search for PBH bursts. Based on a search on the Milagro data, we report new PBH burst rate density upper limits over a range of PBH observation times. In addition, we report the sensitivity of the Milagro successor, the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory, to PBH evaporation events.
In this paper we propose the model that the coalescence of primordial black holes (PBHs) binaries with equal mass $M sim 10^{28}$g can emit luminous gigahertz (GHz) radio transient, which may be candidate sources for the observed fast radio bursts (FRBs), if at least one black hole holds appropriate amount of net electric charge $Q$. Using a dimensionless quantity for the charge $q = Q/sqrt{G}M$, our analyses infer that $qsim O(10^{-4.5})$ can explain the FRBs with released energy of order $O(10^{40}) {rm ergs}$. With the current sample of FRBs and assuming a distribution of charge $phi(q)$ for all PBHs, we can deduce that its form is proportional to $q^{-3.0pm0.1}$ for $qgeq 7.2times10^{-5}$ if PBHs are sources of the observed FRBs. Furthermore, with the proposed hypothetical scenario and by estimating the local event rate of FRBs $sim 2.6 times 10^3 {rm Gpc}^{-3} {rm yr}^{-1}$, one derives a lower bound for the fraction of PBHs (at the mass of $10^{28}$g) against that of matter $f_{rm PBH}(10^{28}{rm g})$ $gtrsim 10^{-5}$ needed to explain the rate. With this inspiring estimate, we expect that future observations of FRBs can help to falsify their physical origins from the PBH binaries coalescences. In the future, the gravitational waves produced by mergers of small black holes can be detected by high frequency gravitational wave detectors. We believe that this work would be a useful addition to the current literature on multimessenger astronomy and cosmology.