Tiny black holes

Looks like physics is about to get very exciting.

It's a common misconception that you have to have a huge amount of mass to create a black hole. Any amount of mass will do, as long as you cram it into a sufficiently small space. A super-massive black hole with the mass of a billion Suns might be the size of our Solar System, but the Earth could be a black hole too if you packed it into the volume of a marble. Even a person will do, although you'd have to cram them into the space occupied by a single electron.

This line of reasoning has led scientists to the inevitable: If we really want to observe black holes and how they radiate, we'll have to whip them up in our own laboratories. And that's exactly what we are on the threshold of being able to do. Now, there is no kind of technology with the ability to physically crush matter to black hole densities, but there's an easy away around that. Einstein showed us that matter and energy are equivalent, so you can also make a black hole by pushing a huge amount of energy into a tiny volume. For those kinds of experiments, there's an obvious choice: particle accelerators. And the next generation is just about to be unveiled.

Amazingly, scientists are becoming increasingly confident that they will be able to create black holes on demand, in quantity, using the new atom-smashers due to come online in the next five years. Some estimates suggest that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN -the acronym is in French) will be able to create an average of one black hole each second. LHC will bombard protons and antiprotons together with such a force that the collision will create temperatures and energy densities not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.

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If it makes you feel any more comfortable, we're pretty sure that if the LHC can produce black holes, then so can cosmic rays, high-energy particles that smash into our atmosphere every day. There are probably a few tiny black holes forming and dying far above you right now.

Wow. If you want all the dense, theoretical details, you can find them here. It's, uh, not exactly light reading. And while we're on the topic of particle accelerators, Japanese researchers believe they can melt down nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet without triggering a reaction by aiming a sufficiently powerful neutrino beam at it - right through the earth, even. Aside from the fact that the accelerator would need to be over a hundred times more powerful than CERN's, a few technical obstacles remain:

[T]he "muon storage ring" generator needed to propose the neutrino beam would need to be 1000 kilometres wide. It would also require 50 gigaWatts of power to operate - the same as used by the entire UK - and would cost an estimated $100 billion to construct. Weber says the first stage of a generator might be feasible within 10 to 20 years, but he reckons the main problem is that the neutrino beam produced would be just a few metres wide. This means a target would need to be very precisely located beforehand. He adds that the beam would produce dangerous alpha and neutron radiation in any living thing in its path.