Mini-review on mini-black holes from the mini-Big Bang

Abstract

We review the basic ideas about man-made quantum mechanical black holes. We start by an overview of the proposed attempts to circumvent the hierarchy problem. We study the phenomenological implications of a strong gravity regime at the terascale and we focus on the issue of microscopic black holes. We provide the experimental bounds on relevant quantities as they emerge from major ongoing experiments. The experimental results exclude the production of black holes in collisions up to 8 TeV. We provide some possible explanations of such negative results in view of forthcoming investigations.