Exploring the Risks of the Large Hadron Collider

In summary, the popular books on physics suggest that when the LHC goes on this summer we might accidentally create a black hole and destroy the planet. But physicists know what they are doing and the LHC will not destroy the Earth. Otherwise claims are simple displays of scientific misunderstandings.
  • #316
mal4mac said:
What is the possibility of a vase reassembling? It would guess it is a lot less than the 1 in 50 000 000 chance of planetary destruction that Rees put down in his book. So you are comparing unlike events,. The chance of winning the UK lottery is roughly 1 in 50 000 000 (with a carry over...) So that's a much better comparison event. Of course physicists are scared to use that, as people would be rather worried about a planetary destruction event occurring with the same probability as the lottery ticket they have just bought. So they make up fairy tales about vases...

And does a popular science book have more authority than published reports?
 
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  • #317
mal4mac said:
I was referring to the "holy ghost". Maybe I made too many assumptions. If you are the same kind of church goer as Martin Rees you probably just go for a chat and don't actually believe in all that stuff (for this allusion check out Dawkins "The God Delusion").

Dawkins is a joke with no academic profession in neither philosophy nor theology... It's like having a professor in biology commenting the dangers about LHC..
I recommend Polkinghornes books, 25years professor in theoretical particle physics at cambridge, and now priest in anglican church ... if you want an update and mature view on science vs. religion.



mal4mac said:
Both are links in the chain, phycisists cannot push off theuir moral responsibility onto politicans.

If the government didn't wanted the atomic bomb, then phycisists could not build it. You don't build mass destruction weapons on your own you know, the government approved. It's like your child asking to build a bomb, but have no money nor authority to do so, then if you give your child both money and authority to do so, who's fault is it that a bomb is beeing made?

mal4mac said:
Maybe, through faulty education, he was convinced that cosmic rays are gamma rays, and didn't think he needed to ask. It seems unfair to call someone a goof because, perhaps, his physics teacher wasn't up to scratch.


enmerkar says he is a scientist, and he uses many quite advanced physics-words, he can't blaim potentially bad teachers for that misstake.

And have you read the saftey report from Cern yet?
 
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  • #318
malawi_glenn said:
And does a popular science book have more authority than published reports?

Depends on who's writing the book...

Are you seriously suggesting that Rees would just make things up in a popular book?
 
  • #319
mal4mac said:
Depends on who's writing the book...

Are you seriously suggesting that Rees would just make things up in a popular book?

You don't use popular science book when entering a discussion with physicsists ;)
 
  • #320
Aren't we going somewhat round in circles here?
 
  • #321
malawi_glenn said:
Dawkins is a joke with no academic profession in neither philosophy nor theology... It's like having a professor in biology commenting the dangers about LHC...

I'm reading an excellent book at the moment called "Medieval Philosophy" by Sharon M Kaye, associate professor of philosophy, and who does she recommend for 'a modern critique of teleology"? That's right, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And that's just the book I happen to be reading today! He has plenty of support from serious philosophers.

malawi_glenn said:
I recommend Polkinghornes books, 25years professor in theoretical particle physics at cambridge, and now priest in anglican church ... if you want an update and mature view on science vs. religion.

There's always one... You might like to check Dawkins' figures for the number of believers amongst Nobel prize winners (and Polkinghorne isn't anywhere near a Nobel prize winner! I read his v. short book on QM. I wish it had been shorter...)
 
  • #322
mal4mac said:
I'm reading an excellent book at the moment called "Medieval Philosophy" by Sharon M Kaye, associate professor of philosophy, and who does she recommend for 'a modern critique of teleology"? That's right, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And that's just the book I happen to be reading today! He has plenty of support from serious philosophers.



There's always one... You might like to check Dawkins' figures for the number of believers amongst Nobel prize winners (and Polkinghorne isn't anywhere near a Nobel prize winner! I read his v. short book on QM. I wish it had been shorter...)

And there is always one philosopher liking Dawkins ;-)

A person who thinks that a nobel prize in physics makes them authoritized to make claims about philosophy or religion is a goof. Myself, who is semieducated, enjoys to dissert Weinberg and C.O's "arguments" against relgion.. maybe we should continue this debate somewhere else? this is off topic
 
  • #323
This may be the first thread in history that I'd advocate locking. But I'll second the motion.
 
  • #324
vanesch said:
Let us not forget that the LHC has at most 14 TeV at its disposal (but actually much less for the elementary collisions of the partons) which corresponds to at most the weight of 10 000 protons. That's very tiny for a BH ! Much much much smaller than the size of a proton. So IF these things interact with a proton, they won't eat up all of the proton, but just maybe one quark of it... and hence liberate a pion.

Is this what would happen? Quarks have partial charges, so in devouring a quark the hole would acquire a partial charge. It would only become neutral again by (electromagnetically)attracting the other quarks from the proton, and afterwards the other particles from the atom. So I would expect a point-sized black hole which manages to hit any part of an atom to end up devouring the whole atom.

Its probability of doing so would be the cross section of the particles divided by the cross section of the atom. Roughly 1/100.000 squared or one in ten billion. To devour one atom it would have to pass through ten billion layers of atoms, or roughly 10 centimeters of solid material. Passing once through the Earth, say ten thousand kilometers of material, it would devour one hundred million atoms, and multiply its original mass by ten thousand. If it started at nearly lightspeed, it would still have a speed larger than 10 km/s. But if it started at nonrelativistic speed, it might not re-emerge.
 
  • #325
ZapperZ said:
Did you actually understood the derivation? Reading it, and understanding it, are two entirely different things.

Ever see A Fish Called Wanda?

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

At some point, one simply has to give up. How do you argue with someone who thinks that the CERN safety committee is deliberately lying? How do you argue with someone who won't read that report? Or someone who won't even read the part of the thread where his concerns are addressed? There are people out there who simply cannot be convinced.
 
  • #326
as an under educated neutral, i find it fascinating how diverse opinions can be across the scientific world on this subject. hopefully this l h c will reduce the diversity of opinions with greater understanding.

those who are most sceptical about safety must be heard, i remember watching a program called 'absolute zero', and it mentioned how many laboratory assistants or professors were seriously injured in the process of their experiments. we have seen the power of splitting the atom, so what power we may unleash by potentially splitting other parts of the atom does hold some trepidation for me, as even if the experiments are safe, the weapons they may derive certainly won't be.
 
  • #327
But the point is that there is very little diversity of opinion on this. The number of particle physicists - the people who are most capable of assessing the risks - insisting that this is unsafe appears to be precisely zero.

There are risk associated with this. Falls and electrical hazards are among the most serious. But a world-ending black hole is not one of them.
 
  • #328
Vanadium 50 said:
But the point is that there is very little diversity of opinion on this. The number of particle physicists - the people who are most capable of assessing the risks - insisting that this is unsafe appears to be precisely zero.

Exactly the point...I have yet to find a single mainstream particle physicist who is concerned about the safety at the LHC. I've heard from a chemist, a card carrying botanist, a science fiction writer, and scores of paranoid laymen without any science background to speak, but yet to hear from a rational person with any credentials. I'm sorry, but Martin Rees does not qualify as someone concerned about its safety...he has enthusiastically articulated his position of suppport. This thread seems to be going nowhere. Despite the ardent efforts of Zapper Z and Vanesch among others, those few seem to be entrenched in their unfounded paranoia, and no amount of scientic rationality is going to pull them out of it. No matter what context you put "1 in 50,000,000" some people simply won't listen and will continue to use it to justify their perseverations.

Regarding Dawkins: one of the main points of his book was that religion is not a province that only theologians are specifically equipped to handle, and that science and reasoning can put an objective probability statement on God's existence, if not disprove him outright. I thought it was a remarkable book, and surely not worthy of anyone's outright dismissal(unless, of course they feel threatened).
 
  • #329
Almanzo said:
Its probability of doing so would be the cross section of the particles divided by the cross section of the atom. Roughly 1/100.000 squared or one in ten billion.

That would be a very high cross section, and if that were the case, then, per astrophysical argument, not just all neutron stars, but probably even all asteroids would already have been transformed into black holes. First of all, it is usually wrong to use the "geometrical" cross sections for this kind of interactions, but even then, you took the geometrical cross section of the nucleus (which is of the order of a 1 fm) - while you should take the geometrical cross section of the black hole - which is of the order of 10^-30 m (I should check but it is the Schwarzschild radius of the mass of 10 000 protons). Now, that gives you a tiny surface: about 30 orders of magnitude smaller than the nucleus surface. So if we can use geometrical arguments, it should interact about 10^30 times less than your estimation here. That said, we don't know what is the real cross section of a micro BH, because in order to even create one at the very low LHC energies (for gravitational phenomena), spacetime has to be very special, and theoretical speculation is abound.

So it might be as large as you say. Or it might be even much smaller than I say. Anyone's bet is ok. In fact, we have no theoretical model of such a BH at all, because all theoretical BH we know should emit Hawking radiation.

Also, your argument about it being charged and hence gobbling up the whole atom is not correct. It would simply become an ionizing particle. Otherwise, your argument would also stop any possibility of ionizing an atom with any radiation, as the "rest of the charge would follow". But again, it might be possible for very peculiar BH (as they aren't of the kind theorists have thought up, everything is possible now).

To devour one atom it would have to pass through ten billion layers of atoms, or roughly 10 centimeters of solid material. Passing once through the Earth, say ten thousand kilometers of material, it would devour one hundred million atoms, and multiply its original mass by ten thousand. If it started at nearly lightspeed, it would still have a speed larger than 10 km/s. But if it started at nonrelativistic speed, it might not re-emerge.

Again, if it had such enormous cross section in its interaction with matter, any such freely traveling BH would immediately transform each stellar body into a BH. We wouldn't be here in the first place.

EDIT: ah, I think I see your argument now: you seem to think that if a BH crosses a nucleus, it "must" absorb it, no matter how small the hole. But on the BH's scale, the nucleus is not a "massive filled thing", in the same way as for a fast electron, the atom is not a massive filled thing".

What you estimated was roughly the probability of a NEUTRON to interact in matter.
 
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  • #330
jms5631 said:
I'm sorry, but Martin Rees does not qualify as someone concerned about its safety...he has enthusiastically articulated his position of suppport. This thread seems to be going nowhere. Despite the ardent efforts of Zapper Z and Vanesch among others, those few seem to be entrenched in their unfounded paranoia, and no amount of scientic rationality is going to pull them out of it. No matter what context you put "1 in 50,000,000" some people simply won't listen and will continue to use it to justify their perseverations.

Well we can always hope that people are reading the saftey reports and that we save a few. Guys who already from the beginning don't know a thing about neither physics nor how to read reports, like mal4mac and enmerkar, will perhpas not change their opinion - but that is their problem. If they want to live in and spread ignorance, it's up to them.
 
  • #331

ref. 2 said:
If the fundamental Planck scale is ≈ 1 TeV, LHC,
with the peak luminosity of 30 fb^−1/year will produce
over 10^7 black holes per year.

The Schwarzschild radius R_S of an (4+n)-dimensional black hole:
[tex]R_s = \frac{1}{\sqrt{\pi} M_p} \left[ \frac{M_{BH}}{M_p} \left( \frac{8 \Gamma\left( \frac{n+3}{2} \right)}{n+2} \right) \right] ^{\frac{1}{n+1}}[/tex]

How do I transform this equation into Systeme International units?

Anyone here interested in examining Rossler's paper disputing Hawking Radiation?

Reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3iMX8xzofc&NR=1"
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0106/0106295v1.pdf"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole"
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1844504&postcount=48"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Radiation"
http://www.wissensnavigator.ch/documents/OTTOROESSLERMINIBLACKHOLE.pdf"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_R%C3%B6ssler"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf3T4ZHnuvc"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2OLjAr1Fc"
Nostradamus 9 44 said:
Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
RAYPOZ will exterminate all who oppose him,
Before the coming the sky will show signs.
 
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  • #332
Almanzo said:
And, by the way, I would like to suggest that if cosmic rays hitting atoms in the Earth's atmosphere are producing black holes, these holes will pass just once through the planet, and then disappear into the great unknown. Their velocity would be way beyond escape velocity.

So what have escape velocity antyhin to do with it? What matters is the directon they go and how they interact with material. Consider for example neutrinos from the sun which passes through the eart 10000000000 each second and square metre. What matters here is the interaction crossection, not the escape velocity...
 
  • #333
The escape velocity seems relevant to me, because a black hole escaping from Earth (and, preferably, from the Solar System too) seems less immediately threatening than a black hole following a decaying orbit inside Earth and finally coming to rest in the center.
 
  • #334
Almanzo said:
The escape velocity seems relevant to me, because a black hole escaping from Earth (and, preferably, from the Solar System too) seems less immediately threatening than a black hole following a decaying orbit inside Earth and finally coming to rest in the center.

Yes, if BH initial velocity is directed radial outwards, then it is a good argument. But since the vast majority of HighE-cosmic rays are directed radial inwards to earth, most of MBH's will go towards earth.. *scary* :-)
 
  • #335
vanesch said:
EDIT: ah, I think I see your argument now: you seem to think that if a BH crosses a nucleus, it "must" absorb it, no matter how small the hole. But on the BH's scale, the nucleus is not a "massive filled thing", in the same way as for a fast electron, the atom is not a massive filled thing".

What you estimated was roughly the probability of a NEUTRON to interact in matter.

You have a point. Just like the atom is made up of a nucleus and some electrons within a lot of empty space, so the nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which are themselves made up of up and down quarks. My expectation is that the hole would have to actually hit one of the most fundamental particles to achieve anything. Its gravity, at this stage, is much to weak to draw a particle in against the electromagnetic or the nuclear force.

However, what is the size of the most fundamental particle? If an electron is fundamental, one might try to calculate a minimum size for an electron, based on the idea that its total mass must be larger (or, at any rate, not smaller) than the mass of its electric field. This gives me a diameter of roughly 1/100.000 of the atom diameter for the electron. The quarks, being more massive, and carrying less charge, might be smaller, say 1/10.000.000 of the atom diameter. Or they might not be that small; they carry other fields, which presumably have their own contributions to their mass.

The black hole would be much smaller still; essentially point sized relative to the quarks and electrons.

Would swallowing an electron cause the hole to attract and devour the nucleus (and the other electrons after that)? Perhaps not. If it formed by cosmic radiation in the atmosphere, it will have relativistic speed, and may not dwell long enough in the vicinity of the other particles to draw them in. But if it formed in the LHC, at a moderate speed, if might well have enough time to do so. And otherwise it would be attracted to any nucleus it passed, increasing its effective cross section until it had neutralized its charge.

At any rate, I wonder whether a black hole could get away after swallowing just one quark. Not only would it have a partial charge, it would also have a colour charge, and be strongly attracted to the remaining quarks. I would at least expect it to take the other two quarks of the same nucleon. If this nucleon is a neutron, this might have little effect. If a proton, the hole would again have charge, and attract electrons. Eventually it would catch one, whether from the same atom or from somewhere else. It would be the electrons that moved towards it, rather than vice versa, considering that the hole is initially 10.000 times as massive at as a proton, and twenty million times as massive as an electron.

But, yes, the cross section of 1/100,000 squared might be wrong. Suppose that it is essential for the hole to hit a quark, with a cross section of 1/100,000,000 squared, and suppose that even if it does so, it only takes one nucleon mass, not an entire atom. Instead of having to pass through ten billion layers of atoms, it would have to pass through ten million billion layers of atoms, or one hundred kilometers of solid mass. On one passage through the Earth the hole would acquire roughly 100 proton masses; it would need 100 orbits to double its mass, which it would complete in a week. The growth would not be linear, because the diameter of the hole itself would slowly increase, but it might be centuries before this became noticable.

However, there would be more than one hole. The holes would be in decaying orbits, ending up in a small region, where they would eventually meet. The diameter of a black hole is proportional to its mass, not to the cube root of its mass. So the ability of a combination of holes to increase its mass would become proportional to the square of the total mass. And when the mass reaches 1030 proton masses, or a few kilograms, their gravity becomes strong enough to overcome interatomic (van der Waals) forces and draw neighbouring atoms in. From there, the growth is exponential.

I expected the "dormant" stage to last a few decades, but it may actually be a hundred thousand years.
 
  • #336
jms5631 said:
I'm sorry, but Martin Rees does not qualify as someone concerned about its safety...he has enthusiastically articulated his position of support.

You can be concerned about safety, but still enthusiastically support something. For instance, a sky diver might be very safety conscious but still jump.
 
  • #337
malawi_glenn said:
Well we can always hope that people are reading the saftey reports and that we save a few. Guys who already from the beginning don't know a thing about neither physics nor how to read reports...

:rolleyes:
 
  • #338
mal4mac said:
You can be concerned about safety, but still enthusiastically support something. For instance, a sky diver might be very safety conscious but still jump.

.. which means that he HAS checked that everything is safe enough to continue to jump. If it isn't, he won't have jumped!

So if you think your analogy is correct, Martin Rees has checked that the LHC is safe and thus, will support its running. Then why are you still using his "concern" here? Via your analogy, it is SAFE. Case closed!

Zz.
 
  • #339
Almanzo said:
You have a point. Just like the atom is made up of a nucleus and some electrons within a lot of empty space, so the nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which are themselves made up of up and down quarks. My expectation is that the hole would have to actually hit one of the most fundamental particles to achieve anything. Its gravity, at this stage, is much to weak to draw a particle in against the electromagnetic or the nuclear force.

You have to get away from the "drawing in" picture. You rather have an *interaction probability* - which is in a normalized form, the so-called cross section (which, I repeat, is at this level usually not to be taken equal to any geometrical cross section, although this might give you eventually an idea of order of magnitude).

So when a MBH crosses nuclear matter - which it its scale, is a swarm of point-like quarks, gluons or eventually their constituents whatever that may be, and with each of these particles, it has a certain interaction probability, and one of the possible interactions is "eating up" (but also: scattering, or other things). This is very similar to what happens when a high-energy electron crosses a proton, only there's no "eating up" reaction, but only scattering. A high-energy electron kicks out, most of the time, just one quark. This gives then rise to a hadronic jet of the kicked-out quark, and a hadronic jet of the rest of the proton.
If we had something similar with a BH, I can imagine (although this is guesswork on my side), that something similar happens: the BH "eats" a single quark, gets colored, and a "hadronic jet" develops in which a newly created color charge will bind (strong force) to the BH, and the remnant quarks will also generate a jet. The colored BH, bound to another quark, will then maybe end up by eating up that bound quark too after some time (depends on its probability to interact with it). But a priori it will not "draw in" the other quarks of the remnant of the proton.

However, what is the size of the most fundamental particle? If an electron is fundamental, one might try to calculate a minimum size for an electron, based on the idea that its total mass must be larger (or, at any rate, not smaller) than the mass of its electric field. This gives me a diameter of roughly 1/100.000 of the atom diameter for the electron.

For sure not. 1/100 000 of an atom diameter is about the size of a nucleus. We know that electrons are way way smaller, given that we use it as a probe inside the proton. In fact, in the standard model, we consider the electron to be point-like.
But again, you cannot really use geometrical arguments to derive interaction probabilities. There is no "touching" at this scale.

But if it formed in the LHC, at a moderate speed, if might well have enough time to do so. And otherwise it would be attracted to any nucleus it passed, increasing its effective cross section until it had neutralized its charge.

You have to understand that far most interactions at the LHC are also not in the center of gravity of the two protons, but rather in the center of gravity of the two interacting quarks, which have wildly different momenta.

At any rate, I wonder whether a black hole could get away after swallowing just one quark. Not only would it have a partial charge, it would also have a colour charge, and be strongly attracted to the remaining quarks.

My guess is that it would end up in a bound state (under the strong force) with a complementary quark.


But, yes, the cross section of 1/100,000 squared might be wrong. Suppose that it is essential for the hole to hit a quark, with a cross section of 1/100,000,000 squared, and suppose that even if it does so, it only takes one nucleon mass, not an entire atom. Instead of having to pass through ten billion layers of atoms, it would have to pass through ten million billion layers of atoms, or one hundred kilometers of solid mass. On one passage through the Earth the hole would acquire roughly 100 proton masses; it would need 100 orbits to double its mass, which it would complete in a week. The growth would not be linear, because the diameter of the hole itself would slowly increase, but it might be centuries before this became noticable.


As I said somewhere else jokingly, we might already have produced a lot of such black holes at the Tevatron, which are just starting to eat out the Earth from inside.
 
  • #340
ZapperZ said:
.. which means that he HAS checked that everything is safe enough to continue to jump. If it isn't, he won't have jumped!

So if you think your analogy is correct, Martin Rees has checked that the LHC is safe and thus, will support its running. Then why are you still using his "concern" here? Via your analogy, it is SAFE. Case closed!

Zz.

Martin Rees might still jump, given his safety analysis, but others might decide, on the same analysis, that it is too risky for them. So the case is never closed, because people will always have different subjective preferences.
 
  • #341
vanesch said:
If we had something similar with a BH, I can imagine (although this is guesswork on my side), that something similar happens: the BH "eats" a single quark, gets colored, and a "hadronic jet" develops in which a newly created color charge will bind (strong force) to the BH, and the remnant quarks will also generate a jet. The colored BH, bound to another quark, will then maybe end up by eating up that bound quark too after some time (depends on its probability to interact with it). But a priori it will not "draw in" the other quarks of the remnant of the proton.

Would it be fair to say that after "eating" a quark, a micro black hole would behave like a quark, although an unusually massive one? In that case, micro black holes, formed by cosmic radiation or whatever, might be found inside some "protons" and account for some of the Dark Matter. That would be interesting, because such "heavy protons" might be harvested from space, and manipulated by means of chemistry. Superdense materials might be created.

Once confined inside an elementary particle, the micro black hole would probably be harmless. (Unless too many of them existed within a small space, and the treshold for formation of a black hole would be exceeded once more. But on second thought, an atom containing a 10.000 proton mass black hole would have merely 10.000 times the density of normal matter, while neutronium has 1015 times that density. If neutron stars can be kilometer-sized, confined micro black holes would not quickly become dangerous.)

vanesch said:
For sure not. 1/100 000 of an atom diameter is about the size of a nucleus. We know that electrons are way way smaller, given that we use it as a probe inside the proton. In fact, in the standard model, we consider the electron to be point-like.
But again, you cannot really use geometrical arguments to derive interaction probabilities. There is no "touching" at this scale.

That is strange. I will try to recalculate the minimum radius for the electron. The idea is that the electric field E = Q/4*pi*epsilon*r2 had an energy density U = epsilon*E2/2, and therefore a mass density U/c2. Which can be integrated over the space outside the electron to yield a mass proportional to 1/R, where R is the radius of the electron. In using the electron as a probe, would it be the size of the electron (at rest) that matters, or rather the wavelength of the (moving) electron's de Broglie wave?
 
  • #342
Almanzo said:
That is strange. I will try to recalculate the minimum radius for the electron. The idea is that the electric field E = Q/4*pi*epsilon*r2 had an energy density U = epsilon*E2/2, and therefore a mass density U/c2. Which can be integrated over the space outside the electron to yield a mass proportional to 1/R, where R is the radius of the electron.

If you do that, you will find the "classical electron radius" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius or the Thomson scattering length.

But that's not the "size" of the electron as a "bullet".
 
  • #343
Almanzo said:
Once confined inside an elementary particle, the micro black hole would probably be harmless.

Not really, because it would interact sooner or later with its partner and "eat it". Just like positronium (a bound state of a positron and an electron) can sooner or later annihilate.
 
  • #344
How much time does it takes to the protons to reach 99.999% of c in the LHC?
 
  • #345
Good question. There are several stages in the acceleration of the beams. See this video for some more info:

 
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  • #346
Sakha said:
How much time does it takes to the protons to reach 99.999% of c in the LHC?
In which referential frame ? :confused:
 
  • #347
In the detectors referential frame.
 
  • #348
Orion1 said:
The Schwarzschild radius R_S of an (4+n)-dimensional black hole:
[tex]R_s = \frac{1}{\sqrt{\pi} M_p} \left[ \frac{M_{BH}}{M_p} \left( \frac{8 \Gamma\left( \frac{n+3}{2} \right)}{n+2} \right) \right] ^{\frac{1}{n+1}}[/tex]
How do I transform this equation into Systeme International units?

First of all, let's stick to 4 dimensions for simplicity where:

[tex]R_s = \frac{2Gm}{c^2}[/tex]

Solving for the smallest black hole having 1 Planck mass:

Rs = 3.23123546 * 10-35 meters

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_mass
 
  • #349
Sakha said:
In the detectors referential frame.
I thought we had the convention that smileys indicate a joke :cry:
gendou2 said:
Rs = 3.23123546 * 10-35 meters
Can we use this to set up an upper bound on the cross section for MBH matter accretion ?
 
  • #350
Sure, but I'm not sure how to do that.
Using the same math as my other post, I calculate the evaporation time of a black hole this size to be 1.38 * 10-40 seconds.
This small size and evaporation time suggests to me that the energy density required for accretion of such a black hole is unimaginably enormous.
In other words, I subscribe to the general statement that present day micro black holes are unstable. Period.
 

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