Collider versus cosmic ray sensitivity to black hole production
By A. Ringwald, H. Tu. 2001
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract In scenarios with extra dimensions and TeV-scale quantum gravity, black holes are expected to be produced copiously at center-of-mass energies above the fundamental Planck scale. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may thus turn into a factory of black holes, at which their production and evaporation may be studied in detail. But even before the LHC starts operating, the Pierre Auger Observatory for cosmic rays, presently under construction, has an opportunity to search for black hole signatures. Black hole production in the scattering of ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos on nucleons in the atmosphere may initiate quasi-horizontal air showers with distinct characteristics above the Standard Model rate. In this Letter, we compare the sensitivity of LHC and Auger to black hole production by studying their respective reach in black hole production parameter space. Moreover, we present constraints in this parameter space from the non-observation of horizontal showers by the Fly's Eye Collaboration. We find that if the ultrahigh energy neutrino flux is at the level expected from cosmic ray interactions with the cosmic microwave background radiation, Auger has only a small window of opportunity to detect black holes before the start of the LHC. If, on the other hand, larger ultrahigh energy neutrino fluxes on the level of the upper limit from “hidden” hadronic astrophysical sources are realized in nature, then the first signs of black hole production may be observed at Auger. Moreover, in this case, the Fly's Eye constraints, although more model-dependent, turn out to be competitive with other currently available constraints on TeV-scale gravity which are mainly based on interactions associated with Kaluza–Klein gravitons.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5322697996110ba98ec5caebaff478fe08a2925
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- Classical black hole production in high-energy collisions (2002, background): “Finally, collisions of cosmic rays with our atmosphere have energy reach beyond that of LHC, and reasonable conjectures about neutrino fluxes suggest the possibility that their black hole products might be seen with present or future cosmic ray observatories[17, 18, 19, 20][9] or absence of their ob”