Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Bee on extra dimensions

Backreaction: Extra Dimensions at the LHC: Status Update

It's rather technical in detail, but Bee Hossenfelder has a look at the early results from the LHC and what they mean for black hole production and theories involving large extra dimensions. The conclusion:

While it is in many cases not possible to falsify a model, but just to implausify it, large extra dimensions are becoming less plausible by the day. Nevertheless, one should exert scientific caution and not jump to conclusions. The relevance of CMS constraints on multi-jets depends partly on assumptions about the black holes' final decay that are not theoretically justified.
The last bit seems to be about her earlier comment that any LHC black hole would be "a quantum gravitational object and it is not correctly described by Hawking's semi-classical calculation. How to correctly describe it, nobody really knows."

Good to know they don't know what to look for, then!

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