The fast, the slow and the merging: probes of evaporating memory burdened PBHs

Abstract

The so-called memory-burden effect implies that evaporating Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) inevitably stabilize before complete decay. This stabilization opens a new mass window for PBH Dark Matter below $10^{15}\,$g. The transition to the memory-burdened phase is not instantaneous but unfolds over cosmological timescales, with some PBHs entering this phase in the present epoch. Additionally, a fraction of PBHs undergo mergers today, forming ''young'' semiclassical black holes that evaporate at unsuppressed rates. Both processes generate fluxes of stable astrophysical particles, which are constrained by current measurements of high-energy $\gamma$-rays and neutrinos. Moreover, the steep increase in energy injection at higher redshifts perturbs the ionization history of the Universe, leading to complementary bounds from observations of the CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies. We find that the reopened window enabled by the memory-burden effect is largely within reach of detection, both locally and across cosmological distances. We further describe how our findings restrict the values of the critical exponent characterizing the memory burden phenomenon.