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The Short GAmma Ray Front Air-Cherenkov Experiment (SGARFACE) uses the Whipple 10 m telescope to search for bursts of gamma rays. Bursts can be detected on time scales from a few ns to 20 !s and with gamma-ray energy above 100 MeV. SGARFACE began operating in March 2003 and has acquired 2.2 million events since. A search for explosions of primordial black holes (PBH) was carried out using the recorded time-resolved images. No unambiguous burst detection could be made due to background events produced by cosmic rays. Upper limits on the PBH explosion rare are presented and compared to other experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) observations at Very High Energies (VHE, E > 100 GeV) can impose tight constraints on some GRB emission models. Many GRB after-glow models predict a VHE component similar to that seen in blazars and supernova remnants, in which the GRB spectral energy distribution has a double-peaked shape extending into the VHE regime. Consistent with this afterglow scenario, EGRET detected delayed high energy emission from all five bright BATSE GRBs that occurred within its field of view. GRB observations have had high priority in the observing program at the Whipple 10m Telescope and will continue to be high priority targets when the next generation observatory VERITAS comes online. Upper limits on the VHE emission from ten GRBs observed with the Whipple Telescope are reported here. © 2005 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]