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Scientists To Hunt For Supersymmetric Particle In LHC
An anonymous reader notes this article about the upcoming restart of the LHC. "A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson. The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy. This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino. Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter". And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe. 'It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky,' said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC. 'We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter.'"
Failing to find what the theories predict is still an advancement in knowledge.
Black holes that small would be hard to see. And if created by advanced civilizations with LHC-sized accelerators, very rare. And then these black holes would evaporate via Hawking radiation quite rapidly (on astronomical time scales).
Have gnu, will travel.
Even if you turned off Hawking radiation, it would still be hard for a black hole from a particle accelerator to actually eat the planet. Let's say you have an accelerator much more powerful than the LHC, with a center-of-mass energy of 1 PeV. If all that were used to produce a black hole, it would have a mass of 1.8e-21 kg. An electron or proton a single hydrogen radius away from it (which we can use as a typical intermolecular distance in the Earth for simplicity) would feel an acceleration of 1e-11 m/s^2, which is absolutely tiny compared to the electrical forces that govern motion on those scales. A small black hole like that behaves much like a neutrino - it hardly interacts with anything. And it needs to do that to grow. I think we could have lots of these inside the Earth and not even notice (dun-dun-DUUN!).
There is an even easier answer to address the fears about LHC micro-black holes. Particles with energies comparable or exceeding LHC energies hit the atmosphere of earth every day, and we observe their effects with Cosmic-ray observatories such as Cerenkov Detectors. Business as usual, and nothing exciting happened for the last billion years.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Nature creates collisions in the atmosphere (cosmic rays) that are many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything at the LHC, and has been doing so since as long as the earth existed. No black holes yet. :)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.