Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Mini-black holes to the rescue...

This is pretty sweet: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0503178

Abstract:
We consider black hole production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a generic scenario with many extra dimensions where the standard model fields are confined to a brane. With ~20 dimensions the hierarchy problem is shown to be naturally solved without the need for large compactification radii. We find that in such a scenario the properties of black holes can be used to determine the number of extra dimensions, n. In particular, we demonstrate that measurements of the decay distributions of such black holes at the LHC can determine if n is significantly larger than 6 or 7 with high confidence and thus can probe one of the critical properties of string theory compactifications.

Score 1 for science! While this doesn't provide a way to prove string theory, it does provide a way to prove if it is wrong altogether. Assuming the LHC can ram those protons together fast enough to produce the mini black holes we need.