SPACE seminar: Roberta Calabrese - "When MACHOs act like WIMPs: hunting primordial black holes with DarkSide-50"

Tuesday 30 Jun 2026, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

Aula 4 (San Marcellino)

Speaker:  Roberta Calabrese (UNINA)

Title: When MACHOs act like WIMPs: hunting primordial black holes with DarkSide-50

Abstract: Liquid argon time projection chambers provide a powerful technology for rare-event searches due to their excellent scalability, background discrimination, and low-threshold sensitivity to ionization signals. Experiments such as DarkSide-50 have demonstrated the capability of this approach in the search for dark matter and other rare interactions, paving the way for DarkSide-20k.
This talk will focus on a search for boosted dark matter from Primordial Black Hole (PBH) evaporation, performed using the ionization-signal-only dataset collected by DarkSide-50, corresponding to an exposure of (12202±180) kg·d. We consider PBHs in the mass range [10¹⁴, 10¹⁶] g, which can emit relativistic Dirac fermionic dark matter particles through Hawking radiation processes. These particles can reach kinetic energies up to hundreds of MeV and produce detectable ionization signatures in liquid argon for dark matter masses below O(100) MeV.

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