Black Holes at the Large Hadron Collider
The very successful 2010–2012 operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has changed the landscape of particle physics. The long-awaited Higgs boson has been discovered, and—yet—there are no signs of new physics beyond the standard model. The LHC set st
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Black Holes at the Large Hadron Collider Greg Landsberg
Abstract The very successful 2010–2012 operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has changed the landscape of particle physics. The long-awaited Higgs boson has been discovered, and—yet—there are no signs of new physics beyond the standard model. The LHC set stringent limits on the existence of TeV-scale new physics phenomena, including models with low-scale quantum gravity, which predict— among other phenomena—copious production of black holes at the LHC. This chapter reviews the current state of these searches and the limits on the possibility to produce black holes at the LHC, as well as future directions, which will be made possible by a significant increase in the LHC energy in 2015 and beyond. Keywords Randall–Sundrum · Large extra dimensions · Warped extra dimensions · Quantum black holes · String balls · Microscopic black holes · LHC · ATLAS · CMS · Quantum gravity · Searches for new physics · Hawking radiation
9.1 Introduction Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started its first successful high-energy operations in 2010, the expectations that new physics beyond the standard model (SM) would appear at any moment were quite high. With √ the large accumulated amount of proton-proton data at center-of-mass energies s = 7 and 8 TeV, more and more sophisticated searches for new physics came along. Among the theoretical paradigms tested to a great extent are the recent models with extra spatial dimensions, either flat or curved, that had appeared about a decade ago and quickly gained a lot of attention of both the theoretical and experimental communities. These models offer a different solution to the infamous “hierarchy problem” that plagues the SM, and promise an exciting possibility of studying quantum gravity at the LHC, including the most mysterious of its consequences: the existence of black holes. G. Landsberg (B) Department of Physics, Brown University, 182 Hope St, Providence, RI 02912, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 X. Calmet (ed.), Quantum Aspects of Black Holes, Fundamental Theories of Physics 178, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-10852-0_9
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While so far all the searches for new physics came empty-handed, several new experimental methods and techniques have been developed. Among these techniques is an empirical method to predict QCD background in high-multiplicity events from low-multiplicity samples, which has been developed for the purpose of searches for black holes. The negative results of the LHC searches changed the very way we think about the “naturalness” (i.e. non-fine-tuned solutions to the hierarchy problem) and paved the way to the ultimate attack on the standard model, which will become possible once the design LHC energy is reached in the next few years.
9.2 Low-Scale Gravity Models Several models with extra dimensions have appeared in recent years following the original, nearly century-old proposal by Kaluza [1] and Klein [2, 3] to achieve a unificatio
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