MICORSCOPIC BLACK HOLES

Nature forms black holes when certain stars, much larger than our Sun, collapse on themselves at the end of their lives. They concentrate a very large amount of matter in a very small space. Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight. Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.

According to the well-established properties of gravity, described by Elinstein's relativity, it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC. There are, however, some speculative theories that predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories preidict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. black holes, therefore, would have no time to start accretion matter and to cause macroscopic effects.

Although stable microscopic black holes are not expected in theory, study of the consequences of their production by cosmic rays shows that they would be harmless. Collisions at the LHC differ from the cosmic-ray collision with astronomical bodies like the Earth in that new particles produced by the LHC collision tend to move more slowly than those produced by the cosmic-rays. Stable black holes could be either electrically charged or neutral. If they had electric charge, they would interact with