Luminosity Signatures of Dark Sector Particles from Black Hole Evaporation in Neutron Stars

Abstract

Microscopic black holes may form at the centers of neutron stars through the accumulation and collapse of dark matter. While Standard Model particles produced by Hawking evaporation are efficiently absorbed by the dense stellar medium, sufficiently weakly interacting and long-lived particles can escape and subsequently decay into high-energy neutrinos, photons, or charged particles, providing an indirect probe of Hawking radiation. We examine the joint energy--angular distribution of these secondary particles, incorporating mediator propagation, energy-dependent decay, and relativistic decay kinematics. For relativistic mediators, the normalized energy-integrated angular profile becomes approximately independent of the black hole temperature, with its characteristic extent controlled primarily by the combination $cτ_S/D$ of the mediator lifetime and source distance, as the boost enhancement of the decay length is compensated by relativistic beaming. We demonstrate the viability of this mechanism and illustrate its phenomenology with gravitationally coupled scalars, dark photons, dark-$Z$ bosons, and heavy neutral leptons. Comparing with monochromatic mediator production from dark matter annihilation, we find that the energy-integrated angular profiles can be nearly degenerate, while the energy spectra and energy-resolved angular distributions remain distinct. These complementary spectral and angular signatures provide targets for high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray searches.