Sunday, January 29, 2012

Mini black holes still unclear

It appears that the question of whether the LHC will create mini black holes is still open, with a recent paper at arXiv about what signals a remnant particle from black hole decay might look like.  The paper contains this paragraph in the introduction:
It is important to recall that the end-stage of the BH evaporation remains an open issue (see,e.g., Refs. [14, 15, 16]), because we do not yet have a con rmed theory of quantum gravity. In fact, the semiclassical Hawking temperature grows without bound, as the BH mass decreases, which can be viewed as a sign of the lack of predictability of perturbative approaches. This is an important issue also on a purely experimental side, since deviations from the Hawking law for small BH mass(near the fundamental scale MG ) could actually lead to detectable signatures.

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