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Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole
MoogMan writes "BBC News reports that a lab fireball may be a black hole.
From the article: "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter falls into a black hole and comes out as "Hawking" radiation." More information available from the NewScientist article (subscription required)."
The e-print of Nastase's paper.
For Horatiu Nastase's paper in pdf format: Title: The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole
A puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matteA puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matter believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gerald A. Miller (206-543-2995, miller@phys.washington.edu), have teamed up for the first time to propose a solution to this puzzle. Reporting independently of the RHIC collaborations, they take into account the fact that the low-energy pions produced inside the fireball act more like waves than classical, billiard-ball-like particles; the pions' relatively long wavelengths tend to overlap with other particles in the crowded fireball environment.
This new quantum-mechanical analysis leads the researchers to conclude that a primordial phenomenon has taken place inside the hot, dense RHIC fireballs. According to Miller and Cramer, the strong force is so powerful that the pions are overcome by the attractive forces exerted by neighboring quarks and anti-quarks. As a result, the pions act as nearly massless particles inside the medium.
Such a situation is believed to have existed shortly after the big bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the pions work against the attraction to escape RHIC's primordial fireball, they must convert some of their kinetic energy into mass, restoring their lost weight. But the pions' experience in the hot, dense environment leaves its mark: the strong attractive force (and the absorption of some of the pions in the collision) would make the fireball appear reduced in size to the detectors that record the pions. According to Miller, looking at the fireball using pions is like looking through a distorted lens: the pions see the radius as about 7 fermi (fm), about the radius of an ordinary gold nucleus, while the researchers deduce the true radius of the fireball to be about 11.5 fm (Cramer, Miller, Wu and Yoon, Phys Rev Lett, tent. 18 March 2005).r believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gera
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
of the sub-plot in Thrice Upon A Time
The usual blackholes with at least a solar mass will last incomprehensible amounts of time since a particle formed near the event horizon has to somehow escape the blackhole's gravitational grasp and you have to somehow move the entire black hole's enormous mass in this way. Don't hold your breath.
It's just lazy, confusion notation for 10 x 10^-24 seconds. Who wants to 10 septillionths of a second, anyway?
r s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbe
"The Hole Man" by Larry Niven.
pooptruck
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
If I understand this correctly, the dual is meant in the sense of the "AdS/CFT-correspondence", which is a mathematical correspondence, or "duality" between a gravitational theory (which may contain black holes) and a "Gauge theory", which is the kind of theory that is used to describe quarks, electrons etc.
The duality means that calculations on black holes may (possibly) be used to understand certain things about this "fireball", but it doesn't mean that the fireball is actually a black hole.
I know there are a lot of jokes that can be made about the idea of building a black hole in a lab, but I just want to make sure people understand how not-dangerous a tiny black hole would be:
Black holes do not "suck". Most people -- even most smart people -- have this impression that black holes suck in everything around them with some sort of unstoppable force. This is completely inaccurate.
Black holes only influence things by their gravity. The force a black hole exerts on another object depends on their masses and the distance between them. Exactly the same as the gravitational force between any other two objects, black hole or no.
The part that makes black holes weird is that they can be significantly smaller (as measured by their event horizon) than normal objects. So if you've got an object with the mass of the Sun, normally it's quite large, so the distance between you and its center is big, and the gravity can only get so strong. If you compress that mass into a black hole, though, you can get much, much closer to its center. If you're only a few kilometers away from the center of gravity of something with the Sun's mass, *then* the gravity will be really strong.
When it comes to very small black holes -- especially the type that might be created by a particle accelerator, with masses far less than that of a single atom -- the mass involved is so miniscule that you'd have to get within femtometers or less before the strength of the gravity would even be noticeable.
Now, *if* black holes were indestructible, eternal objects, then yes, even a small one would eventually pick up enough stray neutrinos to start growing, and could eventually become a threat. But, Hawking radiation takes care of that. In fact, the rate of "evaporation" of a black hole *increases* as the black hole shrinks. So micro-black holes would be very short lived, and, again, therefore not a problem.
Here's the wikipedia article on Hawking radiation for reference.