Still No Black Holes at the Large Hadron Collider

Many scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva will one day create short-lived miniature black holes, but this has not been the case so far.

These man-created black holes should not be a threat to Earth, but they would prove that there actually are more dimensions that the three we experience every day.

Still, so far, the researchers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC say that they have seen nothing of the kind so far.

CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli says that extra dimensions may yet exist as miniature black holes could still be produced at higher energies, so “the search will continue as usual.”

But the fact that so far, no black hole has been created, rules out some variations on the extra dimensions hypothesis, meaning that these extra dimensions, if they do exist, are much harder to detect than some scientists had hoped.

If they are real, the particles thought to transmit the force of gravity called the gravitons, could leak into them, thus explaining why gravity is much weaker than the other forces, New Scientist reports.

And at the high energies the LHC creates, colliding protons could be affected even by gravitons in the extra dimensions, making gravity strong enough to create fleeting black holes … but so far that's not the case.

Inside the LHC, black holes would produce an excess of high-energy particles at right angles to the proton beam, which eliminates the emergence of miniature black holes at energies between 3.5 and 4.5 trillion electron volts or TeV.

And as Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York says, “it puts an important constraint that theorists will have to abide by.”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference, buried around 50 to 175 m underground, between the Swiss and French borders, near Geneva.