Hadrons as Signature of Black Hole Production at the LHC

Abstract

In models with several large extra dimensions and fundamental Planck scale of the order of 1 TeV, black holes can be produced in large numbers at LHC energies. We compute the charged hadron spectra obtained from the decay of black holes created in p-p and Pb+Pb collisions at LHC. We show that hadrons from black hole decay dominate at transverse momenta p_T>30-100 GeV/c compared to usual QCD processes and black hole production signals are easy to identify in hadron transverse momentum spectra. Furthermore we show that a measurement of the charged hadron spectra probes Planck scales up to ~5 TeV for any number of extra dimensions.