INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING JOURNAL OF PHYSICS G: NUCLEAR AND PARTICLE PHYSICS J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 28 (2002) 1657–1665 PII: S0954-3899(02)32987-6 Tevatron—probing TeV-scale gravity today S Hofmann 1 , M Bleicher 2 , L Gerland 3 , S Hossenfelder 1 , K Paech 1 and H St ¨ ocker 1 1 Institut f¨ ur Theoretische Physik, J W Goethe Universit¨ at, 60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2 SUBATECH, Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et des Technologies Associ´ ees, University of Nantes – IN2P3/CNRS – Ecole des Mines de Nantes, 4 rue Alfred Kastler, F-44072 Nantes, Cedex 03, France 3 School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel Received 23 January 2002 Published 10 June 2002 Online at stacks.iop.org/JPhysG/28/1657 Abstract The production of black holes at Tevatron and LHC in spacetimes with compactified space-like large extra dimensions is studied. Either black holes can already be observed in ¯ pp collisions at √ s = 1.8 TeV or the fundamental gravity scale has to be above 1.4 TeV. At LHC the creation of a large number of quasi-stable black holes is predicted, with lifetimes beyond several hundred fm/c. A cut-off in the high-P T jet cross section is shown to be a unique signature of black hole production. This signal is compared to the jet plus missing energy signature due to graviton production in the final state as proposed by the ATLAS collaboration. 1. Introduction A major problem in physics is to understand the ratio between the electroweak scale m W = 10 3 GeV and the four-dimensional Planck scale m P = 10 19 GeV. Proposals that address this so-called hierarchy problem within the context of brane world scenarios have emerged recently [1, 2]. In these scenarios the standard model of particle physics is localized on a three-dimensional brane in a higher dimensional space with large compactified space-like large extra dimensions (LXD). One scenario for realizing TeV-scale gravity is a brane world in which the standard model particles including gauge degrees of freedom reside on a 3-brane within a flat compact space of volume V d , where d is the number of LXDs with radius L. Gravity propagates in both the compact LXDs and the non-compact dimensions. This raises the exciting possibility that the fundamental scale of gravity M f could be as low as m W . As a consequence, future high energy colliders such as the LHC, TESLA or CLIC could probe the fundamental scale of quantum gravity. At this scale short distance physics is dominated by two basic effects: 0954-3899/02/071657+09$30.00 © 2002 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK 1657