Tiny Blackholes in Cosmic Observations?

205th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society 9-13 January 2005 -- San Diego, CA

I am kind of interested to find further information on how microstate blackholes might have been generated and looking at the concentration of minds, I wonder if this topic was brought up, or will be brought up?

The Pierre Auger Observatory, currently being constructed in Argentina to study cosmic rays, could examine the structure of spacetime itself, say physicists in the United States.

If, as some suspect, the Universe contains invisible, extra dimensions, then cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere will produce tiny black holes. These black holes should be numerous enough for the observatory to detect, say Jonathan Feng and Alfred Shapere of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts1.

The observatory will consist of two 3,000-square-kilometre arrays - one in Argentina, one somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere - each containing 1,600 particle detectors. Scheduled for completion by 2004, scientists hope that the equipment will help to solve the mystery of cosmic rays. These rays consist of extremely high-energy particles that stream into the Earth's atmosphere from space - from where, exactly, no one knows.

Lubos has mention Steve Giddings and I have also mentioned himearlier inmy blogs on the topic of Mini blackholes as well.

In theories with large extra dimensions at sub-millimetre distances, for example, and/or high energies of the order of 1 TeV or more, gravity may become a strong force. Thus, hypothetically, the energy required to produce black holes is well within the range of the LHC, making it a "black-hole factory". As Stephen Hawking has taught us, these mini black holes would be extremely hot little objects that would dissipate all their energy very rapidly by emitting radiation and particles before they wink out of existence. The properties of the Hawking radiation could tell us about the properties of the extra spatial dimensions, although there are still uncertainties in the theory at this stage. Nevertheless, astroparticle and collider experiments should provide useful input to the theoretical work in this area. Indeed, the signatures are expected to be spectacular, with very high multiplicity events and a large fraction of the beam energy converted into transverse energy, mostly in the form of quarks/gluons (jets) and leptons, with a production rate at the LHC rising as high as 1 Hz. An example of what a typical black-hole event would look like in the ATLAS detector is shown in figure 2.
If mini black holes can be produced in high-energy particle interactions, they may first be observed in high-energy cosmic-ray neutrino interactions in the atmosphere. Jonathan Feng of the University of California at Irvine and MIT, and Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky have calculated that the Auger cosmic-ray observatory, which will combine a 6000 km2 extended air-shower array backed up by fluorescence detectors trained on the sky, could record tens to hundreds of showers from black holes before the LHC turns on in 2007.

Cosmic rays in ATLAS
The flux of cosmic ray muons through the ATLAS cavern can be utilized as a tool to "shake down" the ATLAS detector prior to data taking in 2007.

Additionally, a thorough understanding of the cosmic ray flux in ATLAS will be of great use in the study of cosmic ray backgrounds to the search for rare new physics processes in ATLAS.