UC Santa Cruz

The potential of directly observing a primordial black hole (PBH) explosion carries immense implications for our understanding of the universe, from cosmology to particle physics. While the existence of PBHs as a candidate for dark matter has been theorized for decades, direct detection of an evaporating PBH would provide invaluable insights into yet-undiscovered high-energy particles and dark radiation. In this thesis, we review the role of PBH as a dark matter candidate, including formation mechanisms and an overview of the state of the field. We model the detection limits for PBH sources in the gamma photon spectrum for a number of modern telescopes and discuss constraints due to velocity dispersion, multi-spectral characteristics and lightcurve evolution. We investigate also the possibility and effect of dark particle radiation arising from dark degrees of freedom in black hole evaporation, and the possibility of a multi-spectral afterglow from PBH evaporation products. Lastly, we apply these novel constraints to the Fermi mission catalogs and produce several candidates at a variety of different possible evaporation stages and distances.