Higgs bosons, information and black holes

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been a bit busy with this Higgs data meeting. It's fun to have people from both CMS and ATLAS (the two detector collaborations at LHC) together in an informal setting :-)

Next week (and for two more weeks after that) I will be at KITP Santa Barbara at the Bits, Branes, Black Holes workshop.

Matter and Antimatter, Angels and Demons

[Slides, audio and video for the talk here.]

Next week I'm giving a public lecture on the science behind the latest Dan Brown blockbuster, Angels and Demons. Sony Pictures and the US LHC collaboration have coordinated similar talks across the country.

The illuminati have resurfaced, and are threatening to blow up the Vatican with an antimatter bomb stolen from CERN ;-)

What can I say? It's a good chance to talk to the general public about antimatter, particle physics and cosmology. I'll post my slides and video of the talk.

One point I'll make in the talk is that Dan Brown has accessed some powerful symbolism here -- contrasting the Catholic church and Vatican with modern particle physics and the massive detectors at the LHC.



The Atlas detector at LHC (click for larger version).



Director Ron Howard talking about the science vs religion aspect of the film.

Colorful quantum black holes at the LHC

New paper! What are the experimental signatures of a quantum black hole -- i.e., a black hole whose Schwarzschild radius is of order the length scale of quantum gravity? It's a long shot, but perhaps we'll see the remnants of tiny quantum black holes in the gigantic detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)!

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.4605

Colorful quantum black holes at the LHC

Xavier Calmet, Wei Gong, Stephen D. H. Hsu

We examine the LHC phenomenology of quantum black holes in models of TeV gravity. By quantum black holes we mean black holes of the smallest masses and entropies, far from the semiclassical regime. These black holes are formed and decay over short distances, and typically carry SU(3) color charges inherited from their parton progenitors. Based on a few minimal assumptions, such as gauge invariance, we identify interesting signatures for quantum black hole decay such as 2 jets, jet + hard photon, jet + missing energy and jet + charged lepton, which should be readily visible above background. The detailed phenomenology depends heavily on whether one requires a Lorentz invariant, low-energy effective field theory description of black hole processes.