Function Accelerator

18
May/090

Is it possible to create an artificial black hole in the particle accelerator and see how it functions ?

Black Holes in particle Accelerators:

There have been suggestions that certain types of microscopic black holes can be made by smashing heavy ions together in particle accelerators. Such suggestions depend critically on some assumptions about the nature of gravity at the microscopic level. It will be interesting to see whether these conjectures can be realized.

In the next few decades, the possibility of black hole production at the highest energy accelerators may arise, if certain predictions of superstring theory are accurate (Scientific American, May 2005). If they are produced, it is thought that black holes would evaporate extremely quickly via Hawking radiation. The tiny size of the black means that they evaporate into hard radiation in a fraction of a second, and there would be no possibility of them swallowing the Earth.

Black Holes in Cosmic Rays:
When a cosmic particle hits an atmospheric proton or neutron with sufficient force, the pair can explode into cascading showers of particles kilometers across. Or, if it's extremely energetic, the ray could create a tiny black hole, which arises when matter becomes ultra-concentrated. Theory predicts these space-time sinkholes should then decay into a wide array of products, from muons to photons.

For miniature black holes to form, the colliding particles must get so close that the gravitational force between them is strong relative to the other forces. This distance is near the so-called Planck length, which in the standard theory of gravity is 10-33 cm.
The energies required to form such black holes are far out of reach of the most powerful accelerators and cosmic rays. But if higher dimensions exist and are relatively large, the Planck distance would increase, and the energy requirement would fall. If such black holes are detected, this means the validity of theories with extra dimensions.