Physicists extend the search for quantum black holes at the LHC

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have extended the search for evidence of microscopic black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

The short version

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• "Had we found evidence, we could have begun to directly study quantum gravity," said Tamas Vami, a researcher in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment who is conducting his postdoctoral work under the guidance of UCSB physics professor Joe Incandela.
• "It's a step toward unifying all of the known fundamental forces, which has been a goal of physicists for more than a century." But a null result does not make for a fruitless search, said Incandela Lab graduate student researcher Danyi Zhang.

What happened

"The result is an exclusion limit, which is a real, publishable statement: 'If this thing existed with these properties, we'd have seen it. We didn't, so we can rule it out here.' That's genuine knowledge about how the universe works." One of the mysteries of our universe is that we exist at a scale much lower than the one fundamental energy scale we know of, the Planck scale.

Why it matters

This could be explained by new physics or a symmetry we have yet to detect, and theorists have determined that this new physics could appear at the energy scales accessible to the LHC.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Phys.org via the links above and below.