Geometric search for Hawking radiation from nearby primordial black holes
A nearby primordial-black-hole (PBH) evaporation burst would produce a curved gamma-ray wavefront, leading to detectable departures from plane-wave inter-satellite delays. We introduce a geometric method that combines imaging localizations with multi-spacecraft timing to determine the distance of a gamma-ray transient. Applied to -localized short GRBs, the most constraining event reaches 1.2 AU, already probing a meaningful Solar System-scale regime. Our analysis shows that direct distance measurements are achievable to 10^3 AU scales with the current and near-future technical capabilities. Once a finite source distance is measured, the corresponding PBH mass and lifetime can be directly inferred. Future wide-field localization and long-baseline deep-space gamma-ray detectors could extend such searches to 10^5 AU and beyond. Swift
Authors
- Shuang-Nan Zhang
- Shuo Xiao
Publication Details
- Journal
- Springer Link (Chiba Institute of Technology)
- Published
- 2026-04-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202660258/pdf
- Primary Topic
- Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00