Picolensing as a Probe of Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter

Abstract

The gravitational-lensing parallax of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is an intriguing probe of primordial black hole (PBH) dark matter in the asteroid-mass window, $2\times 10^{-16}{M}_{\odot }\lesssim M_{\text{PBH}}\lesssim 5\times 10^{-12}{M}_{\odot }$. Recent work in the literature has shown exciting potential reach for this "picolensing" signal if a future space mission were to fly two x-/${\hat{I}}^3$-ray detectors in the Swift/BAT class, with inter-spacecraft separation baselines on the order of the Earth-Moon distance. We revisit these projections with a view to understanding their robustness to various uncertainties related to GRBs. Most importantly, we investigate the impact of uncertainties in observed GRB angular sizes on reach projections for a future mission. Overall, we confirm that picolensing shows great promise to explore the asteroid-mass window; however, we find that previous studies may have been too optimistic with regard to the baselines required. Detector baselines on the order of at least the Earth-L2 distance would make such a mission more robust to GRB size uncertainties; baselines on the order of an astronomical unit (AU) would additionally enable reach that equals or exceeds existing microlensing constraints up to $M_{\text{PBH}}\sim 2\times 10^{-8}{M}_{\odot }$.

39 pages, 13 figures. Published version