Search For Very High Energy Gamma Ray Emission From Primordial Black Holes With Veritas

"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 10^14g (or 10^−20 times the mass of the Sun) 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 then look for these primordial black hole bursts in its data, in the hopes of constraining the rate-density of their final evaporation. This work describes the search for such black holes, using the VERITAS telescopes, as well as developing new techniques in order to reach better limits. The 99% C.L. upper limits obtained in this work are of 2.22 × 10^4 pc^−3 yr^−1, an improvement from previous VERITAS limits by a factor of 6, as well as from limits measured by other experiments." --