Primordial Black Holes as dark matter candidates: Constraints from the diffuse MeV emission

¹ LAPTh, CNRS, USMB, F-74940 Annecy, France
² Institut für Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Universität Würzburg, Campus Hubland Nord, Emil-Fischer-Str. 31, 97074 Würzburg, Germany

^* e-mail: μberteaud@lapth.cnrs.fr

Published online: 20 March 2023

Abstract

For more than 20 years, the Compton telescope had provided the best measurements of the Galactic diffuse MeV spectrum. Recently, our analysis of 16 years of data from the SPectrometer on INTEGRAL (SPI) measured this emission with a higher signal-to-noise ratio. At MeV energies, the dominant contribution to the diffuse emission comes from inverse Compton scattering. Nonetheless, sub-dominant emission from Primordial Black Hole (PBH) Dark Matter (DM) can be searched for in these data. Hypothetically formed from the collapse of over-densities before Big Bang nucleosynthesis, PBHs are interesting candidates for DM in the ΛCDM model of cosmology. PBHs of masses between 10¹⁶ and 10¹⁸ g, in the so-called asteroid mass range, are currently unconstrained and can saturate the DM cosmological abundance. MeV emission from PBH in this mass range is expected to come from PBH evaporation. We searched for the PBH signal with 16 years of SPI data, and demonstrated that PBHs cannot account for all the DM if their mass is smaller than 4 × 10¹⁷ g.