LHC Switch-on Fears Are Completely Unfounded

Newswise — A new report published on Friday, 5 September, provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s switch-on, due on Wednesday this week, poses no threat to mankind. Nature's own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC, which will enable nature's laws to be studied in controlled experiments.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.

The report, 'Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions', published in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.

The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth " and the planet still exists."

The Safety Assessment Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth, other planets in our solar system, the Sun and all the other stars in our universe itself to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will in fact pose no threat.

The report also concludes that, since cosmic-ray collisions are more energetic than those in the LHC, but are incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, we should not fear their creation by the LHC.

LHC collisions will differ from cosmic-ray collisions in that any exotic particles created will have lower velocities, but the Safety Assessment Group shows that even fast-moving black holes produced by cosmic rays would have stopped inside the Earth or other astronomical bodies. Their existence proves that any such black holes could not gobble matter at a risky rate.

As the Safety Assessment Group writes, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists." They conclude that such microscopic black holes could not grow dangerously.

As for the equally hypothetical strangelets, the review uses recent experimental measurements at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, New York, to prove that they will not be produced during collisions in the LHC.

Notes to EditorsContact1. For further information or a full draft of the journal paper, contact IOP Press Officer, Joe Winters:Tel: 020 7470 4815Mobile: 07946 321473E-mail: [email protected]

Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions

2. The published version of the paper "Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions" (J. Ellis et al, 2008 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 35 1150004) will be available online from Friday, 5 September. Advance copies can be viewed at http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3414. Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics

3. Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, published by IOP Publishing, is the highest-ranked original research journal in the 'physics, nuclear' category as listed by ISI®. The journal covers theoretical and experimental topics in the physics of elementary particles and fields, intermediate-energy physics and nuclear physics. For further information please visit http://www.iop.org/journals/jphysg.

The Institute of Physics4. The Institute of Physics is a scientific membership organisation devoted to increasing the understanding and application of physics. It has an extensive worldwide membership (currently around 34 000) and is a leading communicator of physics with all audiences from specialists through government to the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics. Go to http://www.iop.org.