Probing Dark Sectors with Exploding Black Holes: Gamma Rays

TL;DR

This paper assesses how current and future gamma ray telescopes can detect signals from black hole explosions to explore dark sectors, improving analysis methods and estimating sensitivities for various experimental setups.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, realistic analysis of gamma ray signals from black hole explosions to probe dark sectors, optimizing statistical methods and response functions.

Findings

Current experiments can probe dark fermions up to 10^5 GeV.

Future experiments can reach up to 10^6 GeV for dark fermions.

Sensitivity varies with distance and sky position of the explosion.

Abstract

The Hawking radiation from the explosion of a black hole would provide definitive information on the particle spectrum of nature. Here we quantify the potential of current and future gamma ray telescopes to probe new dark sectors. We improve on the analysis used in previous work by making careful use of the experimental response functions, deriving a more realistic estimate of the backgrounds and optimizing the statistical analysis. We compute the sensitivity of the current experiments (HAWC and LHAASO) and estimate the reach of the future experiments (SWGO and CTA North and South), for various sky positions of the explosion. We find that for a black hole exploding at $0.01\,\text{pc}$ the gamma ray signal observed by HAWC could probe dark sectors with 10-20 (or more) new Dirac fermions up to masses around $10^5\,\text{GeV}$, while CTA will be able to probe 2-15 new Dirac fermions with masses up to $10^6\,\text{GeV}$. CTA North and South will have sensitivity to 10 dark fermions up to a distance of 0.1 pc and 50 up to a distance of 0.6 pc.