Black hole supercolliders

TL;DR

This paper proposes that natural collisions near near-extremal Kerr black holes can serve as cosmic supercolliders, reaching energies of tens to hundreds of TeV, potentially revealing new physics.

Contribution

It introduces a natural astrophysical mechanism for ultra-high-energy particle collisions near black holes, expanding the concept of particle accelerators beyond human-made devices.

Findings

Collisions near near-extremal Kerr black holes can reach 10s to 100s of TeV energies.

Such collisions occur naturally from particles falling from infinity and orbiting material.

This process provides a potential natural laboratory for high-energy physics.

Abstract

We show that collisions between particles free falling from infinity and a disk of material plunging off the retrograde innermost stable circular orbit of a near-extremal Kerr black hole is the unique astronomically natural way in which to create a gravitational particle accelerator with center of mass energies at the $10$'s to $100$'s of teraelectronvolt range, in other words a supercollider.