Prospects for Finding Primordial Black Holes with the Rubin Observatory
Abstract
New tools are presented to generate simulated catalogs of microlensing events in theMilky Way from populations of primordial black holes tracing the dark matter halo. These Monte Carlo methods are orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art simulations, and reduce the computational requirements from a large computer cluster to a laptop for full-sky surveys. A new statistic and method is demonstrated for highly efficient detection of microlensing events in multi-color star surveys. The background filtering is sufficiently strong to reject all lightcurves in a subset of NOIRLab Source Catalog data, while maintaining high efficiency on simulated events injected on the same data. These insights are combined to predict the exclusions on PBH dark matter the Legacy Survey of Space and Time will create over the ten-year survey.