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LHC's potential black holes... are they worth worrying about?
:: 31 January, 2009
New claims concerning the controversial Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator have this week suggested that microscopic black holes created by the gigantic atom-smashing machine could, contrary to official safety reports, will not vanish quite as quickly as they form.
Moreover, a group of physicists have scrutinised the mathematic processes involved in operating the 27-kilometre ringed accelerator and determined that any resulting black holes will not simply disappear from existence a mere millisecond after being created, which is the line LHC scientists are holding to.
According to Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama in the United States, miniscule black holes spawned by the collider could exist for up to a second or longer.
The physicists believe this length of time, an eternity when it comes to particle physics, could then potentially allow the black holes to struggle for growth increase as opposed to merely decaying in an instant – a struggle the team’s theoretical model shows they ultimately would not win.
While Casadio, Fabi and Harms concede that planet-threatening growth is highly unlikely, with any created black holes passing harmlessly beyond the atmosphere before disappearing completely, they have offered that current safety claims are inaccurate.
“We conclude that… the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible,” they outlined through a paper posted to scientific discussion forum ArXiv.org. “Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer than is typically predicted by other models.”
The European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) team behind the LHC particle accelerator, which is buried deep under the Swiss/French border, is hoping the mighty machine will enable them to re-create, study, and understand conditions in the universe at the very point of its creation.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, suffered a mechanical failure when it was officially fired up in the latter half of 2008. Following a frustrating period of repair, CERN scientists are expected to resume smashing protons at velocities approaching the speed of light this coming spring.
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