Search for Primordial Black Holes with SGARFACE

Abstract

The Short GAmma Ray Front Air Cherenkov Experiment (SGARFACE) uses the Whipple 10 m telescope to search for bursts of $\gamma$ rays. SGARFACE is sensitive to bursts with duration from a few ns to $\sim$20 $\mu$s and with $\gamma$-ray energy above 100 MeV. SGARFACE began operating in March 2003 and has collected 2.2 million events during an exposure time of 2267 hours. A search for bursts of $\gamma$ rays from explosions of primordial black holes (PBH) was carried out. A Hagedorn-type PBH explosion is predicted to be visible within 60 pc of Earth. Background events were caused by cosmic rays and by atmospheric phenomena and their rejection was accomplished to a large extent using the time-resolved images. No unambiguous detection of bursts of $\gamma$ rays could be made as the remaining background events mimic the expected shape and time development of bursts. Upper limits on the PBH explosion rate were derived from the SGARFACE data and are compared to previous and future experiments. We note that a future array of large wide-field air-Cherenkov telescopes equipped with a SGARFACE-like trigger would be able to operate background-free with a 20 to 30 times higher sensitivity for PBH explosions.

18 pages, 30 figures, accepted by Astroparticle Physics, corrected author list and Section 2.1

References in corpus (26)

• Black Holes and Sub-millimeter Dimensions
• Gravitational Waves from Coalescing Black Hole MACHO Binaries
• The First VERITAS Telescope
• Long-lived Bloch oscillations with bosonic Sr atoms and application to gravity measurement at micrometer scale
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: The Power Spectrum and Evaporation of Early Structures
• Chemical Freeze-out and the QCD Phase Transition Temperature
• The Formation of Primary Galactic Nuclei during Phase Transitions in the Early Universe
• Primordial Structure of Massive Black Hole Clusters
• The MACHO Project First Year LMC Results: The Microlensing Rate and the Nature of the Galactic Dark Halo
• Local Flux of Low-Energy Antiprotons from Evaporating Primordial Black Holes
• Do Evaporating Black Holes Form Photospheres?
• Clustering of primordial black holes: Basic results
• Search for Gravitational Waves from Primordial Black Hole Binary Coalescences in the Galactic Halo
• Limits on Black Hole Formation from Cosmic String Loops
• A black hole solution to the cosmological monopole problem
• Black holes thermodynamics to all orders in the Planck length in extra dimensions
• On the formation of a Hawking-radiation photosphere around microscopic black holes
• Primordial Black Holes: Do They Exist and Are They Useful?
• On generation of Crab giant pulses
• On the Density of PBH's in the Galactic Halo
• Peculiar Relics from Primordial Black Holes in the Inflationary Paradigm
• Constraints on diffuse neutrino background from primordial black holes
• SGARFACE: A Novel Detector For Microsecond Gamma Ray Bursts
• Meteor light curves: the relevant parameters
• Detection Techniques of Microsecond Gamma-Ray Bursts using Ground-Based Telescopes
• Cosmological Black Hole Formation due to QCD and Electroweak Phase Transitions

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Primordial black hole constraints with Hawking radiation -- a review
• Active Galactic Nuclei under the scrutiny of CTA
• Accretion of nonminimally coupled scalar fields into black holes
• Accretion of non-minimally coupled generalized Chaplygin gas into black holes
• Search for the evaporation of primordial black holes with H.E.S.S