Black holes from cosmic rays: probes of extra dimensions and new limits on TeV-scale gravity.

By L. Anchordoqui, Jonathan L. Feng, H. Goldberg, A. Shapere. 2001

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If extra spacetime dimensions and low-scale gravity exist, black holes will be produced in observable collisions of elementary particles. For the next several years, ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays provide the most promising window on this phenomenon. In particular, cosmic neutrinos can produce black holes deep in the Earth's atmosphere, leading to quasihorizontal giant air showers. We determine the sensitivity of cosmic ray detectors to black hole production and compare the results to other probes of extra dimensions. With $ng~4$ extra dimensions, current bounds on deeply penetrating showers from AGASA already provide the most stringent bound on low-scale gravity, requiring a fundamental Planck scale ${M}_{D}g1.3\char21{}1.8 \mathrm{TeV}.$ The Auger Observatory will probe ${M}_{D}$ as large as 4 TeV and may observe on the order of a hundred black holes in 5 years. We also consider the implications of angular momentum and possible exponentially suppressed parton cross sections; including these effects, large black hole rates are still possible. Finally, we demonstrate that even if only a few black hole events are observed, a standard model interpretation may be excluded by comparison with Earth-skimming neutrino rates.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a9632414f2dbaefef917ca50a73f517341b33c9

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Citations in the corpus

Classical black hole production in high-energy collisions (2002, background): “bounds on the fundamental Planck scale[21].”
Planck-scale modified dispersion relations and Finsler geometry (2006, background): “Among these opportunities let us remember deviations from Newton’s law at very short distances [1, 2], Planck-scale fuzziness of spacetime [3], possible production in TeV-scale QG scenarios of mini-black holes at colliders [4] or in cosmic rays [5], QG induced violations of discrete symmetries of th”
IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, background): “Future measurements in the EeV range could probe BSM modifications of the cross section at center-of-momentum energies of up to 100 TeV [58, 255–263] and test the structure of nucleons with a sensitivity comparable with colliders [264–266].”