1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking’s formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would “evaporate” in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on “LHC Black Hole” for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking’s theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes — and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory — ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively ‘at rest’, and be captured by Earth’s gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don’t rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the “cosmic ray argument” posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to: http://www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)

1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking’s formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would “evaporate” in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on “LHC Black Hole” for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking’s theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes — and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory — ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively ‘at rest’, and be captured by Earth’s gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don’t rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the “cosmic ray argument” posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to: http://www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner

1) Higgs boson

2) Magnetic Monopole

3) Strangelet

4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole or micro black hole]

In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking’s formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would “evaporate” in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.

In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.

Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on “LHC Black Hole” for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking’s theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.

The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes — and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory — ignores one very fundamental difference.

In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.

At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively ‘at rest’, and be captured by Earth’s gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don’t rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.

There are a host of other problems with the “cosmic ray argument” posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.

I am not without some experience in science.

In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.

While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot support such because of the risks involved.

For more information, go to: http://www.LHCdefense.org

Regards,

Walter L. Wagner

best of luck with your talk. Try to convey the excitement of what you do, and you’re half-way to hiring them all. Tell them what makes you proud of participating in the experiment, tell then what you boast about when you talk to your friends.

Cheers,
T.

My talk on Monday will be to show some eager young summer students why our work creating the QGP at RHIC is interesting and so convince them to sign up. The overthrow of the limiting temperature by QCD is an old but neat part of the story. For those who are interested, some very similar material can be found in a talk I gave at an Ohio APS sectional meeting last year, available here:

http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/WWW/publish/stankus/Ohio_APS_06/

I don’t think I’ll mention micro black holes, except maybe in passing . Remember, on the Internet no one knows you’re an experimentalist.

Cheers,

Paul

Sounds like you’re in store for a relaxing weekend but is this lecture something you proposed, was it assigned to you, what is the occasion, and will you revise your presentation based on your recent searches?

Buena suerte,
Fred

Thanks very much! for the straight dope and informative links (after I posted the question here I found these two links in a comment of yours on the micro-black hole page thread on Backreaction).

I’m relieved to hear that the question of how the extra dimensions might evolve cosmologically is unclear, since I had no idea how to guess at it myself. I believe you when you say that any predictions depend strongly on this mechanism, whatever it is. But can I ask the simplest possible question? What effect would extra large, compact dimensions have on early-time cosmology if their size were somehow just fixed? or is this somehow a disallowed possibility?

If the Planck scale were really as low as a few TeV all through the history of the universe, then I’ve got to imagine that it would have severe consequences! For example, you couldn’t have a thermal system of standard model particles with a temperature any higher than that scale, since you’d be creating micro black holes on nearly every collision! between particles and so the temperature becomes set by their evaporation. Try to push the temperature any higher and the micro holes only get bigger and cooler and last longer, which brings the effective temperature down even further!

I’m about to deliver a lecture on Monday in which I will describe how QCD saved the early universe from the “veil” of the old Hagedorn limiting temperature at 170 MeV or so. Now do I have to confront the limiting temperature idea all over again? And at a scale that’s not even that much higher! These would be ironic times, indeed.

Thanks again; best,

Paul

There are some general considerations about this, e.g.

Early Inflation and Cosmology in Theories with Sub-Millimeter Dimensions

and

Phenomenology, Astrophysics and Cosmology of Theories with Sub-Millimeter Dimensions and TeV Scale Quantum Gravity

Best,

B.

thanks for your comments here. I think I need to read some of those references…

Cheers,
T.

Thanks very much for the references. As you say, these papers discuss the existence of black holes in a thermal stage of the early universe, possibly created at the end of inflation; but they don’t address micro black holes being created as a result of large extra dimensions (ie as a result of the Planck scale being as low as a TeV). So I’m still looking for an answer to the specific question of large extra dimensions affecting cosmology.

Also, I’m tickled to see these very recent papers drawing a connection between early-time black holes and baryogenesis. In a demonstration that not only do great minds think alike but sometimes mediocre and great think alike as well, I speculated on exactly this point in when posting the same question recently on Cosmic Variance: “… wouldn’t the early universe have been thick with black holes whenever the temperature were above a TeV scale? Does this have any interesting implications for, say, baryogenesis in the thermal phase?” (I didn’t get very much love over at CV, so I appreciate doing a little better here so far.)

Regards,

Paul Stankus

The paper
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1111v1
is very interesting but doesn’t discuss large extra dimension scenarios.
The basic danger is that if it is too easy to produce black holes, the early Universe becomes dense with them
through the Jeans instability.
Usually their production is suppressed
by exp(-mPlanck^2/Temp^2). This factor may be modified in large extra dimension models.

Some primordial black hole models can be made consistent cosmological data. For example:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0703070
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0703250
These don’t discuss TeV scale gravity
although the second one talks about a brane world scenario.

And thanks for the link to the paper. I will give it a look.
Cheers,
T.

hep-ph/0505181

QCD-supression by Black Hole Production at the LHC
Authors: Leif Lonnblad, Malin Sjodahl, Torsten Akesson

Here is the reference

hep-ph/0505181

Abstract: Possible consequences of the production of small black holes at the LHC for different scenarios with large extra dimensions are investigated. The effects from black hole production on some standard jet observables are examined, concentrating on the reduction of the QCD cross section. It is found that black hole production of partons interacting on a short enough distance indeed seem to generate a drastic drop in the QCD cross section. However from an experimental point of view this will in most cases be camouflaged by energetic radiation from the black holes.

(I recall there was something funny with the 1st version of the paper that I read, not sure what they did about it.)

Hmm, well, thanks for that information. I admit, I never really checked on this. See, we did the calculation, pointed out the effect and several people said (independently) it’s not a good signature, so I basically lost interest. That’s good news, though I am not working on that any more one way or the other.

Also, I recalled there was a paper last year or so by some Swedish guys who re-discovered the effect, let me see whether I find the reference.

Best,

B.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1111v1

It’s great to see all the excitement about micro black holes being produced in high-energy collisions at the LHC. But I’d like to ask for help/advice on a related question, namely the implications for the early universe.

If micro black holes can be produced in TeV-scale parton collisions, then wouldn’t the thermal early universe have been thick with black holes whenever the temperature was above a TeV? In general, how would large extra dimensions influence the evolution of the early universe, and so how can cosmological observations place limits on the existence of large extra dimensions?

I’d appreciate whatever anyone can tell me.

Thanks,

Paul Stankus