Eric Penrose | an e-mail to Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum

from Eric Penrose <ericpenros AT googlemail DOT com&rt;
to randall@ AT physics.harvard DOT edu,
sundrum AT pha.jhu DOT edu
date Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:08 AM
subject Critical Review of LHC Safety Arguments
mailed-by googlemail.com

Dear Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum

I have read the interesting book 'Warped Passages' and believe that the TeV
gravity RS 1 or similar, could offer a realistic prospect of describing
gravity at the micro scale and appears to address problems with available
supersymmetry theory.

I am sending this email and attachment to you, because this theory is the
particular basis of an argument of astrophysicist and cosmic ray specialist
Habil. Dr Rainer Plaga, that there is a theoretical basis for catastrophe (
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415v3) from LHC collisions.

This relies on a non standard microcanonical Hawking radiation
interpretation (Int.J.Mod.Phys. A17 (2002) 4635-4646;
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0110255) that allows LHC black hole decay and
radiation times of over 30 years in isolation. This is discussed on pages
4-6 of attached paper.

Your Randall-Sundrum TeV gravity theory also provides the basis for a
concern of mine given below and on p.13 of attachment, in relation to how it
could enable (negative) strangelet production to be particularly more likely
from lead lead collisions.

"The only argument offered then is that it is extremely unlikely that such
could be produced. This is because of reliance ([2]) upon interpretations
known as 'thermal' or 'coalescence' models for data from the RHIC collider -
which has a tenth of the energy of the LHC.

But there are three considerations that are neglected in this context:

1. The relevance of ‘TeV gravity’ theories to this question is not
considered in safety reviews. While we cannot be sure the parameter values
for micro black holes would be dangerous, it is argued here that this may
not then apply for strangelets. At levels approaching but not reaching that
of TeV gravity, although gravity would not be as strong as the
nuclei-binding 'strong nuclear' force, it could still be stronger than the
electromagnetic force (which is many times weaker than TeV gravity would be
anyway) responsible for interactions dependent upon charge. "The strength of
gravity depends so strongly on position along the fifth [extra] dimension"
[26] Collisions that are sufficiently off centre, where the full centre mass
of the travelling nuclei does not contribute to the collision energy, would
meet such criteria. One example of this electromagnetic force is the
repulsive interaction of positively charged sub nuclear particles in
collision. The inhibition of such elasticity effects of collision at higher
energies can be made possible where sufficiently near TeV gravity energies
are attained between colliding particles.

2. .."

Throughout, the question is considered as to whether there are theoretical
or astrophysical reassurance arguments that have been put forward that can
exclude such risks.

I would hope that you would seriously and urgently consider the attached
work into the very serious issue of LHC safety.

I have today been sending to many relevant figures at CERN.

Eric Penrose

BSc Maths

Download: Eric Penrose's Critical Review of LHC Safety Arguments(2).pdf