Colloquia

If the scale of quantum gravity is as low as a TeV, as was proposed by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, and Dvali a few years ago, one of the most dramatic manifestation of this fact would be copious production of miniature black holes at the CERN's LHC accelerator, qualifying the latter as black-hole factories. These rapidly evaporating black holes could serve as sensitive probes of quantum gravity effects, topology of extra dimensions, and as a laboratory to produce new particles with the mass ~100 GeV. I'll discuss the black hole production and decay mechanisms at future colliders and the opportunities of cosmic ray detectors in observing black holes in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray collisions. Using the Higgs boson as an example, I'll demonstrate that it can be found in the decays of black holes as early as in the first hour of operation of the LHC, even with incomplete detectors.