Probing quantum gravity effects in black holes at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum gravity effects could alter the Hawking radiation from miniature black holes potentially produced at the LHC, by modeling modifications to black hole evaporation and analyzing decay products for evidence.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to model black hole evaporation with quantum gravity corrections and implements these into an event generator for phenomenological analysis.

Findings

Modified decay processes show distinct signatures in decay products.

Quantum gravity effects could be detectable at TeV-scale black hole experiments.

Evaporation to smaller masses reveals potential observable phenomena.

Abstract

We study modifications of the Hawking emission in the evaporation of miniature black holes possibly produced in accelerators when their mass approaches the fundamental scale of gravity, set to 1 TeV according to some extra dimension models. Back-reaction and quantum gravity corrections are modelled by employing modified relations between the black hole mass and temperature. We release the assumption that black holes explode at 1 TeV or leave a remnant, and let them evaporate to much smaller masses. We have implemented such modified decay processes into an existing micro-black hole event generator, performing a study of the decay products in order to search for phenomenological evidence of quantum gravity effects.