Revisiting constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes as dark matter candidates
By P. Montero-Camacho, Xiao Fang, Gabriel A. Vasquez, Makana Silva, C. Hirata. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2019
239 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As the only dark matter candidate that does not invoke a new particle that survives to the present day, primordial black holes (PBHs) have drawn increasing attention recently. Up to now, various observations have strongly constrained most of the mass range for PBHs, leaving only small windows where PBHs could make up a substantial fraction of the dark matter. Here we revisit the PBH constraints for the asteroid-mass window, i.e., the mass range 3.5× 10−17M⊙ < mPBH < 4× 10−12M⊙. We revisit 3 categories of constraints. (1) For optical microlensing, we analyze the finite source size and diffractive effects and discuss the scaling relations between the event rate, mPBH and the event duration. We argue that it will be difficult to push the existing optical microlensing constraints to much lower mPBH. (2) For dynamical capture of PBHs in stars, we derive a general result on the capture rate based on phase space arguments. We argue that survival of stars does not constrain PBHs, but that disruption of stars by captured PBHs should occur and that the asteroid-mass PBH hypothesis could be constrained if we can work out the observational signature of this process. (3) For destruction of white dwarfs by PBHs that pass through the white dwarf without getting gravitationally captured, but which produce a shock that ignites carbon fusion, we perform a 1+1D hydrodynamic simulation to explore the post-shock temperature and relevant timescales, and again we find this constraint to be ineffective. In summary, we find that the asteroid-mass window, which was previously constrained due to femtolensing, WD survival, optical microlensing, and neutron star capture is no longer constrained. Hence, the asteroid-mass window remains open for PBHs to account for all the dark matter.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42619881004b29820a65929924b7ba2c647b3846
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Citations in the corpus
- Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “Here the constraints are from the extragalactic gamma ray background (EGγ [12]), galactic 511 keV line (e [87–89]), white dwarf explosions (WD [90], see [91] for criticism), gravitational lensing events (HSC [92], EROS [93], OGLE [94]), dynamical effects (SEGUE [95]), and cosmic microwave background”
- Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “[135] suggest that this mass range is still allowed.”
- Generating PBHs and small-scale GWs in two-field models of inflation (2020, background): “ot show constraints from the presence of neutron stars in globular clusters around M˘10 13M [80] and femtolensing around M˘10 15M [81] since they have been contested in the literature, see e.g. Refs. [82,83]. Note that all these constraints are constantly updated and improved. 5 Generating Gravitati”
- Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[180], who conclude that this mass range is still allowed.”