LHC Peril! Large Hadron Collider Black Hole Will Eat Earth!! - or, Not

Almost certainly not. But three scientists published a paper earlier this month about very interesting theoretical possibilities involving CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that they uncovered.

So What if the LHC Makes a Black Hole?

Here's the deal: CERN's LHC is expected to go online this summer. When it does, it might produce a really, really small black hole. The odds of that happening are about 1 to 50,000,000. If the Large Hadron Collider did make a black hole, it would have the mass of two protons, be much smaller than an atom, and won't have much of an effect beyond a few proton-widths.

Black holes that size 'evaporate,' fast. These three scientists worked out a scenario where it takes the black holes a little longer to evaporate.

Here's where the tabloids could have fun: If the Large Hadron Collider created a black hole that didn't evaporate, it would eat Earth: LHC, Europe, the Atlantic, Louisiana's Superdome, and all.

Doomsday Machine to Destroy Earth in 2009? Not Likely

Teeny, tiny, geriatric black holes are interesting, even intriguing, but not all that worrisome. The scientists wrapped up their introduction with "we argue against the possibility of catastrophic black hole growth at the LHC."

In other words, 'it ain't gonna happen.' And, since they live on the same planet as the Large Hadron Collider, my guess is that they're pretty confident that they're right.

These aren't crackpots. All three have gotten published in the Journals of the American Physical Society. (That's the bunch that publishes Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and Reviews of Modern Physics - a sort of physicists' Sports Illustrated.)

And, they picked a catchy title for their paper:

"On the Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC"
Roberto Casadio, Sergio Fabi, Benjamin Harms, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology, arXiv.org, Cornell University Library (January 19, 2009)

Here's the entire introduction:

"In this paper we present the results of our analysis of the growth and decay of black holes possibly produced at the Large Hadron Collider, based on our previous study of black holes in the context of the warped brane-world scenario. The black hole mass accretion and decay is obtained as a function of time, and the maximum black hole mass is obtained as a function of a critical mass parameter. The latter occurs in our expression for the luminosity and is related to the size of extra-dimensional corrections to Newton's law of gravitation. Based on this analysis, we argue against the possibility of catastrophic black hole growth at the LHC. "

You might want to read the paper itself: it's only eight pages, and available in several formats. It's a little technical, though, like this excerpt: "...our world is a four-dimensional brane (with coordinates xμ, μ = 0, . . . , 3) embedded in a five-dimensional manifold whose metric, without other sources present...."

More posts about CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) :

• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider Goes Full Circuit"
  (September 10, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - Tests Still Going Well "
  (August 26, 2008)
• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider: the Proton Beam Failsafe "
  (August 22, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - the Countdown Continues "
  (July 6, 2008)
• "Large Hadron Collider - Huge Research Tool "
  (June 28, 2008)
• "CERN Large Hadron Collider: Photos "
  (March 20, 2008)
• "Photos of Five Cool Research Facilities"
  (January 5, 2008)

More:

• "CERN's Large Hadron Collider: A List of Posts "