Physicists, Russian scientists among them, who work on Large Hadron Collider’s CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector, claim that their search for tiny black holes, which, according to some existing theories, could have appeared in proton collisions in this accelerator, was ineffective – no traces of such black holes have been detected.

The article, accepted to the Physics Letters magazine, says that experiments allowed excluding generation of black holes with minimal mass of 3.5-4.5 Teraelectronvolt, resulting from proton-proton interactions.

A hypothesis about possible generation of black holes inside Large Hadron Collider was one of popular “goose bumping” theories, invented by opponents of Large Hadron Collider, who wrote to United Nations and various courts in order to prevent the launch of the accelerator. Collider’s opponents believed that proton collisions could have led to emergence of black holes, which could have destroyed our planet.

There exist some physical theories, which assume existence of additional “folded” dimensions (these dimensions exist at Planck length scale – 1.6x10^-35 meters), and these theories leave room for generation of black holes in particle collisions. According to this theory, all fundamental interactions, except gravity – electroweak and electrostrong interactions stay in our Universe, where four dimensions (three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension) exist. As for gravity or gravitational interaction, it can get into folded dimensions, where Newtonian gravity laws differ from our world.

 

 

Gravity pierces into additional dimensions and gets very strong there, due to Planck length, smaller compared to ordinary conditions. During collision of two partons (quarks or gluons) extremely strong gravity can “open doors” to additional dimensions, where a tiny black hole can form, an author of the study explains.

Black holes in “ordinary” macro world usually appear at last stages of evolution of massive stars. When such stars run out of thermonuclear “fuel” – hydrogen or helium – gas pressure cannot resist gravity anymore, and gravitational attraction collapses a star into a black hole. Black stars are notable for having second cosmic speed higher, than speed of light, and that is why no information or radiation can ever escape from a black hole.

A border between regions with normal and high second cosmic speed is known as Schwarzschild sphere. When we deal with tiny black holes in additional dimensions, gravity properties lead to gravitational collapse and Schwarzschild sphere appearing in particle collisions.

In case such an event real does happen, a black hole will immediately evaporate, giving birth to a “shower” of ordinary matter particles, which can be detected by LHC’s detectors, with CMS detector, in particular. During a set of proton-proton collisions in 2010 scientists have kept an eye on possible signs of specific traces of black hole generation. However, no evidence was detected for tiny black holes with mass between 3.5 and 4.5 Teraelectronvolt for a wide range of theoretical models, which permit existence of additional dimensions.