Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are of interest in many cosmological contexts. PBHs lighter than about 1012 kg are predicted to be directly detectable by their Hawking radiation. This radiation should produce both a diffuse extragalactic gamma-ray back
ground from the cosmologically-averaged distribution of PBHs and gamma-ray burst signals from individual light black holes. The Fermi, Milagro, Veritas, HESS and HAWC observatories, in combination with new burst recognition methodologies, offer the greatest sensitivity for the detection of such black holes or placing limits on their existence.
The design and performance of the GPS Timing and Control (GTC) System of the High Altitude Water Cerenkov (HAWC) gamma ray observatory is described. The GTC system provides a GPS synchronized absolute timestamp, with an accuracy better than 1$mu$s, f
or each recorded event in HAWC. In order to avoid any slack between the recorded data and the timestamp, timestamps are injected to the main data acquisition (DAQ) system after the Front-end Electronic Boards (FEBs). When HAWC is completed, the HAWC main DAQ will use 10 time to digital converters (TDCs). In order to keep all the TDCs in sync, the GTC system provides a synchronized clock signal, coordinated trigger signal, and control signals to all TDCs.
We report on observations of correlated behavior between the prompt gamma-ray and optical emission from GRB 080319B, which (i) strongly suggest that they occurred within the same astrophysical source region and (ii) indicate that their respective rad
iation mechanisms were most likely dynamically coupled. Our preliminary results, based upon a new cross-correlation function (CCF) methodology for determining the time-resolved spectral lag, are summarized as follows. First, the evolution in the arrival offset of prompt gamma-ray photon counts between Swift-BAT 15-25 keV and 50-100 keV energy bands (intrinsic gamma-ray spectral lag) appears to be anti-correlated with the arrival offset between prompt 15-350 keV gamma-rays and the optical emission observed by TORTORA (extrinsic optical/gamma-ray spectral lag), thus effectively partitioning the burst into two main episodes at ~T+28+/-2 sec. Second, prompt optical emission is nested within intervals of (a) trivial intrinsic gamma-ray spectral lag (~T+12+-2 and ~T+50+/-2 sec) with (b) discontinuities in the hard to soft evolution of the photon index for a power law fit to 15-150 keV Swift-BAT data (~T+8+/-2 and ~T+48+/-1 sec), both of which coincide with the rise (~T+10+/-1 sec) and decline (~T+50+/-1 sec) of prompt optical emission. This potential discovery, robust across heuristic permutations of BAT energy channels and varying temporal bin resolution, provides the first observational evidence for an implicit connection between spectral lag and the dynamics of shocks in the context of canonical fireball phenomenology.
