English

Constraining primordial black hole abundance with Insight-HXMT

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-12-23 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are a major candidate for dark matter and they have been extensively constrained across most mass ranges. However, PBHs in the mass range of 101710^{17} - 102110^{21} g remain a viable explanation for all dark matter. In this work, we use observational data from the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT) to refine constraints on PBHs within the mass range of 2×10162\times10^{16} - 5×10175\times10^{17} g. Our analysis explores three scenarios: directly using observational data, incorporating the astrophysical background model (ABM), and employing the power-law spectrum with an exponential cutoff. Our results indicate that although Insight-HXMT does not have an advantage in the first two scenarios, when considering the power-law model, its exceptional sensitivity in the hard X-ray regime and sufficiently high upper energy limit significantly strengthen the constraints on PBHs with masses greater than 101710^{17} g compared to previous limits. Furthermore, the exclusion limit for PBHs as dark matter has reached 4×10174\times10^{17} g, which is comparable to the current threshold.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.09297,
  title  = {Constraining primordial black hole abundance with Insight-HXMT},
  author = {Chen Yang and Jun-Da Pan and Xin Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09297},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures