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-/$\gamma$-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

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes in dwarf galaxies using Hubble Space Telescope photometry
• A Multi-Wavelength Survey of Transient Lensing Opportunities for Primordial Black Hole Searches