EpiStack

H-17 - Any microscopic black hole produced at the LHC decays essentially instantly rather than persisting

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Properties9
type
hypothesis
id
H-17
state
merged
question
Would microscopic black holes produced at the LHC be stable, or decay immediately?
statement
If LHC collisions produce microscopic black holes at all (possible only in TeV-scale-gravity scenarios), those black holes decay — via Hawking radiation and/or the quantum-mechanical link between production and decay — on timescales so short that they disintegrate before reaching the detector walls; they are not stable objects.
source
S-1 - LSAG report- Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions
locator
abstract; §4
quote
Any microscopic black holes produced at the LHC are expected to decay by Hawking radiation before they reach the detector walls.
merged_into
H-10 - Rotating micro black holes evaporate essentially as fast as nonrotating ones - lifetime differs by at most a factor 2.7

The report treats stability as requiring a violation of basic principles: suppressing the decay rate relative to the production rate would violate quantum mechanics, and suppressing Hawking radiation would violate general relativity (both mechanisms remain valid in the extra-dimensional scenarios that motivate black-hole production). The stable case is nevertheless analysed separately as a worst case, via charge stopping and the Giddings-Mangano accretion bounds.

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