A black hole conjecture and rare decays in theories with low scale gravity

Abstract

In models with large extra dimensions, where the fundamental gravity scale can be in the electroweak range, gravitational effects in particle physics may be noticeable even at relatively low energies. In this paper, we perform simple estimates of the decays of elementary particles with a black hole intermediate state. Since black holes are believed to violate global symmetries, particle decays can violate lepton and baryon numbers. Whereas previous literature has claimed incompatibility between these rates (e.g. p-decay) and existing experimental bounds, we find suppressed baryon- and lepton-violating rates due to a new conjecture about the nature of the virtual black holes. We assume here that black holes lighter than the (effective) Planck mass must have zero electric and color charge and zero angular momentum—this statement is true in classical general relativity and we make the conjecture that it holds in quantum gravity as well. If true, the rates for proton-decay, neutron–antineutron oscillations, and lepton-violating rare decays are suppressed to below experimental bounds even for large extra dimensions with TeV-scale gravity. Neutron–antineutron oscillations and anomalous decays of muons, τ-leptons, and K- and B-mesons open a promising possibility to observe TeV gravity effects with a minor increase of existing experimental accuracy.