11–13 May 2026
University of Pittsburgh
US/Eastern timezone

First-Order QED Corrections to the Electron Spectrum of Hawking Radiation from Asteroid-Mass Primordial Black Holes: Formalism and Numerical Evaluation of Dissipative Interactions

12 May 2026, 18:00
15m
University of Pittsburgh

University of Pittsburgh

Speaker

Bowen Chen (Ohio State University)

Description

Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the asteroid-mass window ($10^{17}-10^{22}$ g) are a well-motivated dark-matter candidate, and Hawking radiation sets constraints based on their evaporation outcomes such as photons, electrons and positrons. In this specific mass range, the Hawking temperatures are high enough to facilitate the generation of electron-positron pairs, which can contribute to the 511 keV annihilation line and impose further constraints on the abundance of PBHs. Accurate predictions therefore require a systematic QED calculation of the electron spectrum from Hawking radiation. In this study, the first-order QED correction to the dissipative part of the electron spectrum in a Schwarzschild black-hole background is derived using the interaction-Hamiltonian formalism. The resulting correction is organized into distinct channels, and the infrared behavior of the correction in the soft-photon limit is analyzed in detail. Preliminary numerical results and progress toward a full numerical evaluation will also be presented.

Authors

Bowen Chen (Ohio State University) Christopher Hirata (Ohio State University)

Co-authors

Cara Nel (The Ohio State University) Emily Koivu

Presentation materials

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