Conveners
Session 6
- Chair: Ilia Musco
After many years where the belief that dark matter is in the form of elementary particles has been the dominant paradigm, there is now growing support for the idea that at least in part dark matter is made up of primordial black holes. Although there have been a number of observational and theoretical pointers in this direction, there are two areas where a strong case has been made that...
Primordial black holes (PBHs) remain a viable dark matter candidate in the asteroid-mass range. I will show that, if PBHs lie within this mass range and make up most or all of the dark matter, the PBH abundance would be large enough for at least one object to cross through the inner Solar System per decade. Since Solar System ephemerides are modeled and measured to extremely high precision,...
Asteroid mass primordial black holes (mass $10^{16}-10^{21}$ grams) are viable candidates to describe the total dark matter content of the universe. One of the interesting features of these primordial black holes (PBHs) being a source of dark matter is their Hawking temperature is greater than 100 keV, meaning that charged particle pairs can easily be created for nontrivial hawking radiation...
In this analysis, we investigate the scenario wherein Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) with very low masses ($ M_{\rm PBH} \lesssim 10^9{\rm\,g} $) undergo evaporation during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) epoch. This evaporation process leads to a non-standard behavior in the expansion rate of the Universe, which plays a crucial role in determining the freeze-out of nuclear reactions. This...
The energy injection through Hawking evaporation has been used to put strong constraints on primordial black holes as a dark
matter candidate at masses below 1e18 g. However, recent work has shown that Hawking’s semiclassical approximation breaks
down at latest after half-decay. Beyond this point, the evaporation could be significantly suppressed. In this work, we review
existing...
Among many mechanisms that produce particles via gravitational interactions, the production of particles from the expansion of the universe represents a simple and irreducible source of particles from the early universe, that can account for the present abundance of dark matter. Another feasible and interesting mechanism is to have a population of primordial black holes that, through...
