Mini Black Holes In LHC Could Consume Universe: Study

Despite best efforts to allay them, fears of the universe's collapse triggered by mini black holes created in the collisions of Large Hadron Collider, continue to exist.

Physicists who attested to the safety of LHC ruled out mini black holes consuming the universe. Now, a new paper claims that mini black holes could cause the Higgs field to take on a lower energy stable state and cause the collapse of vacuum. Until recently, scientists had regarded such an energy transition for the Higgs Field as unlikely as it could a time much longer than the age of the universe. The new paper by theoretical physicists Ian Moss, Philipp Burda and Ruth Gregory however argues that a black hole could make that happen in a fraction of a second.

The paper states that such black holes, microscopic in size, can come to be in two ways. They can be primordial or could be created in the collisions of LHC. Primordial black holes destroying the universe can be ruled out straightaway as such black holes have existed for as long as the universe itself! Though if they succeed they could do it in a fraction of a second, LHC black holes may not succeed in consuming the universe, the paper argues by pointing to cosmic ray collisions. These rays crash into the atmosphere in collisions with energy magnitudes higher than those of LHC. Any mini black hole created in collisions of cosmic rays should have consumed the universe long ago.

Not everyone is convinced with the paper. John Ellis who examined the safety of LHC, said he is not going to be disturbed by the paper. "I'm not going to lose sleep over it. If someone asks me, I'm going to say it's so much theoretical noise," he said.