Search for microscopic black hole signatures at the Large Hadron Collider

• Main Authors: Alver, B. (Contributor), Bauer, Gerry P. (Contributor), Bendavid, Joshua L. (Contributor), Butz, Erik M. (Contributor), Busza, Wit (Contributor), Cali, Ivan Amos (Contributor), Chan, M. (Contributor), Dutta, V. (Contributor), Everaerts, Pieter Bruno Bart (Contributor), Gomez-Ceballos, Guillelmo (Contributor), Goncharov, Maxim (Contributor), Hahn, Kristian Allan (Contributor), Harris, P. (Contributor), Kim, Y. (Contributor), Klute, Markus (Contributor), Lee, Y.-J (Contributor), Li, W. (Contributor), Loizides, C. (Contributor), Luckey, P. David, Jr (Contributor), Nahn, Steven (Contributor), Ma, Teng (Contributor), Paus, Christoph M. E. (Contributor), Ralph, Duncan Kelley (Contributor), Roland, Christof E. (Contributor), Roland, Gunther M. (Contributor), Rudolph, Matthew Scott (Contributor), Stephans, George S. F. (Contributor), Sumorok, Konstanty C. (Contributor), Sung, Kevin Kai Hong (Contributor), Wenger, Edward Allen (Contributor), Xie, S. (Contributor), Yang, M. (Contributor), Yilmaz, Yetkin (Contributor), Yoon, A. S. (Contributor), Zanetti, Marco (Contributor), Wyslouch, Boleslaw (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier, 2014-12-31T19:34:28Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 A search for microscopic black hole production and decay in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV has been conducted by the CMS Collaboration at the LHC, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35 pb[superscript −1]. Events with large total transverse energy are analyzed for the presence of multiple high-energy jets, leptons, and photons, typical of a signal expected from a microscopic black hole. Good agreement with the standard model backgrounds, dominated by QCD multijet production, is observed for various final-state multiplicities and model-independent limits on new physics in these final states are set. Using simple semi-classical approximation, limits on the minimum black hole mass are derived as well, in the range 3.5-4.5 TeV. These are the first direct limits on black hole production at a particle accelerator.