Related papers: Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and…
Experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory will study collisions between gold nuclei at unprecedented energies. The concern has been voiced that ``strangelets''-hypothetical products of these collisions - may trigger the destruction…
We discuss speculative disaster scenarios inspired by hypothetical new fundamental processes that might occur in high energy relativistic heavy ion collisions. We estimate the parameters relevant to black hole production; we find that they…
The upcoming high energy experiments at the LHC are one of the most outstanding efforts for a better understanding of nature. It is associated with great hopes in the physics community. But there is also some fear in the public, that the…
The question of whether collider produced of subnuclear black holes might constitute a catastrophic risk is explored in a model of Casadio & Harms (2002) that treats them as quantum-mechanical objects. A plausible scenario in which these…
It has been suggested that rotating black holes could serve as particle colliders with arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy. Astrophysical limitations on the maximal spin, back-reaction effects and sensitivity to the initial conditions…
Recent papers by Busza et al. and Dar et al. have considered empirical bounds on the risk of producing a hypothetical stable negatively charged strangelet at the Brookhaven relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) experiments, and thereby…
High-energy accelerators are large projects funded by public money, developed over the years and constructed via major industrial contracts both in advanced technology and in more conventional domains such as civil engineering and…
The safety of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was studied in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, who concluded that they presented no danger. Here we review their 2003 analysis in light of additional experimental results and…
There is a curious absence of legal constraints on U.S. government agencies undertaking potentially risky scientific research. Some of these activities may present a risk of killing millions or even destroying the planet. Current law leaves…
We show that intermediate mass black holes conjectured to be the early precursors of supermassive black holes and surrounded by relic cold dark matter density spikes can act as particle accelerators with collisions, in principle, at…
Searches for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics are performed at accelerators worldwide. Although having poorer detection capabilities and large beam uncertainties, ultra high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) experiments present…
Five years have passed since the first collisions of Au nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island. With nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies of up to sqrt(s_NN)=200GeV…
As was suggested about a year ago, one of the most dramatic consequences of low-scale (~1 TeV) quantum gravity is copious production of mini black holes at future accelerators and in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray collisions. Hawking…
We present a short overview on the ideas of large extra-dimensions and their implications for the possible production of micro black holes in the next generation particle accelerator at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) from this year on. In fact,…
Many recent discoveries in astrophysics involve phenomena that are highly complex. Carefully designed experiments, together with sophisticated computer simulations, are required to gain insights into the underlying physics. We show that…
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory is the first accelerator specifically constructed for the study of very hot and dense nuclear matter. At sufficiently high temperature, nuclear matter is…
If TeV-scale gravity describes nature, black holes will be produced in particle accelerators, perhaps even with impressive rates at the Large Hadron Collider. Their decays, largely via the Hawking process, will be spectacular. Black holes…
We present an overview of the conjectured production of microscopic black holes as a consequence of high energy hadronic collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) from this year on. Provided the presence of…
Black hole production in elementary particle collisions is among the most promising probes of large extra spacetime dimensions. Studies of black holes at particle colliders have assumed that all of the incoming energy is captured in the…
In these two lectures, we will address the topic of the creation of small black holes during particle collisions in a ground-based accelerator, such as LHC, in the context of a higher-dimensional theory. We will cover the main assumptions,…