Hunting Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter in Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest
Akash Kumar Saha, Abhijeet Singh, Priyank Parashari, Ranjan Laha

TL;DR
This paper uses Lyman-alpha forest observations to set new constraints on primordial black holes as dark matter candidates by analyzing their Hawking radiation effects on the intergalactic medium's temperature.
Contribution
It introduces a novel method to constrain PBH dark matter using IGM temperature evolution from Lyman-alpha data, considering both astrophysical heating and non-heating scenarios.
Findings
Constraints on PBH fraction are below 0.1% for 10^{16} g mass.
The method provides competitive and complementary bounds compared to other observations.
Systematics differ from other probes, offering a new avenue for dark matter research.
Abstract
A very pressing question in contemporary physics is the identity of Dark Matter (DM). Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are one of the most well-motivated DM candidates. Light PBHs have been constrained by either the non-detection of their Hawking radiation itself, or by the non-observation of any measurable effects of this radiation on astrophysical and cosmological observables. We constrain the PBH contribution to the DM density by non-detection of their Hawking radiation's effect on the intergalactic medium (IGM) temperature evolution. We use the latest deductions of IGM temperature from Lyman- forest observations. We put constraints on the fraction of DM as PBHs with masses g - g, separately for spinning and non-spinning BHs. We derive constraints by dealing with the heating effects of the astrophysical reionization sources on the IGM in two ways. In…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstronomy and Astrophysical Research
