Published February 15, 2008 | Version v1
Journal article

Black hole bound on the number of species and quantum gravity at CERN LHC

  • 1. CCPP, Department of Physics, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, New York 10003 (United States)
  • 2. CERN, Theory Division, CH-1211 Geneva 23 (Switzerland)
  • 3. ITPP, EPFL, CH-1015, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Description

In theories with a large number N of particle species, black hole physics imposes an upper bound on the mass of the species equal to MPlanck/√(N). This bound suggests a novel solution to the hierarchy problem in which there are N≅1032 gravitationally coupled species, for example 1032 copies of the standard model. The black hole bound forces them to be at the weak scale, hence providing a stable hierarchy. We present various arguments, that in such theories the effective gravitational cutoff is reduced to ΛG≅MPlanck/√(N) and a new description is needed around this scale. In particular, black holes smaller than ΛG-1 are already no longer semiclassical. The nature of the completion is model dependent. One natural possibility is that ΛG is the quantum gravity scale. We provide evidence that within this type of scenarios, contrary to the standard intuition, micro-black-holes have a (slowly fading) memory of the species of origin. Consequently, the black holes produced at LHC will predominantly decay into the standard model particles, and negligibly into the other species

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
Journal Volume
77
Journal Issue
4
Journal Page Range
p. 045027-045027.8
ISSN
0556-2821
CODEN
PRVDAQ

Optional Information

Notes
(c) 2008 The American Physical Society