Creating a black hole that doesn't evaporate

[Mazuz]

It may be possible that with a powerful enough particle collider that we can create very small black holes. They are supposed to evaporate extremely fast, a tiny fraction of a second. I know that we aren't even sure we can make them, but some of today’s leading theories suggest we can. Can these same theories suggest a way in which we can, in the near future, create a black hole that won't evaporate? Might it be possible to create a super small black hole and feed it fast enough to make it permanent? Perhaps shoot a beam of particles at it as soon as it forms or something. Wondering what people who know more about this than me think.

 

[Chen]

It would be pretty fatal to create a black hole here on Earth, wouldn't it?

 

[Integral]

While it may be theoritically possible I think the energies required are many orders of magnitude beyond our current cababilities.

 

[ZapperZ]

OK, so this is not even relevant to answering the question here, and I swear, it is NOT an April Fool's joke! :) But I get a chuckle each time I see this "black hole in particle collider" thingy.

Several years ago, when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven was about to go online, there was a small "controversy" going on when someone as prominent as Frank Wilczek suggested that the collisions at RHIC may create black holes. Of course, the popular media grabbed on to things like this and ran away with it. Not to be left behind was the Comedy Central, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart sent their ace reporter to do a piece on this.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the Brookhaven PR people didn't see the humor in it, and they did not get the permission to film at RHIC. But due to some inside connection, they still managed to obtain access to Brookhaven but only managed to film around another facility, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), but not RHIC. I was a postdoc at Brookhaven at that time, and doing work at the NSLS in particular. So there was this one morning, I was doing some measurements and minding my own business when I saw a group of people being escorted around the NSLS experimental floor, with people holding video cameras and microphones. I thought nothing of it, since this isn't that uncommon because the lab occasionally videotape stuff for presentation, etc. Besides, I was and am not a regular viewer of Comedy Central (except for South Park) and so I didn't recognize those people.

It was several weeks later that my boss at the lab came in one morning, and told everyone that Brookhaven was on the Comedy Central the night before and they did a report on the possibility of a black hole being created at RHIC. He said it was hysterical and then he immediately turned to me and pointed his finger at me and said "... and you're in it!"

I had nothing intelligent to say in return except "What the...?"

Luckily, he brought a taped copy of the show, and a whole bunch of us crowded into a conference room to watch it. And yes, it was hysterical, especially with the added knowledge that we all knew they were filming and showing the wrong facility. And yes, I was definitely in it - 2 seconds worth - and I didn't even realize I was being filmed in the middle of my work.

Needless to say, I made a copy of the tape, and I have been showing it to unsuspecting victims ever since to stretch out that 2 seconds into my 15 minutes worth of "fame". :)

Zz.

 

[Chen]

There was also a Hollywood film about some scientist that discovered a way to create stable black holes in his laboratory. And then some people find out and try to stop him but they don't make it in time and he creates a giant black hole that is sucking things into him, until they finally reach the electricity console and ... shut the black hole down by bringing the power network down!

 

[Nereid]

While it may be theoritically possible I think the energies required are many orders of magnitude beyond our current cababilities.

Just to add to this ... IIRC, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the most powerful collider here on Earth, and it will have collision energies ~>10 TeV (or ~1,000 TeV if they use heavy nuclei?). That's ~10¹⁵ eV.

The top end of the cosmic ray energy spectrum, observed so far, is >10²⁰ eV (though gammas have been observed 'only' up to ~> 1 TeV).

There's a veritable zoo of 'heavy' particles expected in various theories, with names that include Wimpzillas and winos, made in natural particle accelerators, one (hypothetical) class of which has been dubbed 'zetatrons' (no prizes for guessing why).

No mini-BHs yet. Whew

 

[Pergatory]

I read a book once can't remember much about it but it involved the creation of such black holes. They managed to create one and it immediately fell toward the center of the earth, slowly sucking up matter from inside the planet as it orbited the 'nucleus' (core) and becoming bigger and bigger. They ended up building a series of humongous EM deflectors all around the Earth to push the black hole out into space before things started getting messy.

 

[Loren Booda]

Geons are stable, charged black holes that balance gravitational energy with that electrostatic. John Archibald Wheeler posits certain elementary particles to be constructed from geons.

 

[Zurtex]

There was also a Hollywood film about some scientist that discovered a way to create stable black holes in his laboratory. And then some people find out and try to stop him but they don't make it in time and he creates a giant black hole that is sucking things into him, until they finally reach the electricity console and ... shut the black hole down by bringing the power network down!

Yes and it has Amanda Tapping in

Oh it's one of those awful films you just have to watch at least once.

 

[Janitor]

I'm writing a film script. The working title is "The Black Hole that Ate Batavia."