Search for Primordial Black Hole Evaporation with VERITAS

Understand

Primordial black holes are black holes that may have formed from density fluctuations in the early universe.

• It has been theorized that black holes slowly evaporate.
• If primordial black holes of initial mass of $10^{14}$g were formed, their evaporation would end in this epoch, in a bright burst of very-high-energy gamma rays.
• A Cherenkov telescope experiment like VERITAS can look for these primordial black hole bursts in its archival data, constraining the rate-density of their final evaporation.