arXiv subjects

Aidan Symons

Publications and source records attributed to Aidan Symons.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Probing Dark Sectors with Exploding Black Holes: Gamma Rays

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.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Could We Observe an Exploding Black Hole in the Near Future?

Observation of an exploding black hole would provide the first direct evidence of primordial black holes, the first direct evidence of Hawking radiation, and definitive information on the particles present in nature. However, indirect constraints suggest that direct observation of an exploding Schwarzschild black hole is implausible. We introduce a dark-QED toy model consisting of a dark photon and a heavy dark electron. In this scenario a population of light primordial black holes charged under the dark $u(1)$ symmetry can become quasi-extremal, so they survive much longer than if they were uncharged, before discharging and exhibiting a Schwarzschild-like final explosion. We show that the answer is "yes", in this scenario the probability of observing an exploding black hole over the next $10$ years could potentially be over $90\%$.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Explaining the PeV Neutrino Fluxes at KM3NeT and IceCube with Quasi-Extremal Primordial Black Holes

The KM3NeT experiment has recently observed a neutrino with an energy around 100PeV, and IceCube has detected five neutrinos with energies above 1PeV. While there are no known astrophysical sources, exploding primordial black holes could have produced these high-energy neutrinos. For Schwarzschild black holes this interpretation results in tensions between the burst rates inferred from the KM3NeT and IceCube observations, with indirect constraints from the extragalactic gamma ray background and with the non-observation of an associated gamma ray signal at LHAASO. In this letter we show that if there is a population of primordial black holes charged under a new dark $u(1)$ symmetry which spend most of their time in a quasi-extremal state, the neutrino emission at 1PeV may be more suppressed than at 100PeV. The burst rates implied by the KM3NeT and IceCube observations and the indirect constraints can then all be consistent at $1\sigma$, and no associated gamma-ray signal was expected at LHAASO. Furthermore, these black holes could constitute all of the observed dark matter in the universe.

hep-ph↗