Black Holes at Future Colliders and Beyond: a Review

As was suggested about a year ago, one of the most dramatic consequences of low-scale (∼ 1 TeV) quantum gravity is copious production of mini black holes at future accelerators and in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray collisions. Hawking radiation of these black holes is constrained mainly to our (3+1)-dimensional world and results in rich phenomenology. With the original idea having been cited over a hundred times since its appearance, we review the current status of astrophysical observations of black holes and selected topics in the mini black hole phenomenology, such as production rates at colliders and in cosmic rays, Hawking radiation as a sensitive probe of the dimensionality of extra space, as well as an exciting possibility of finding new physics in the decays of black holes. “The Theory of Everything, if you dare to be bold, Might be something more than a string orbifold.” Sheldon Glashow, 1986